One shouldn’t call a “cult of personality” the papal devotional items that are offered to the hordes of pilgrims and tourists round about Saint Peter’s in Rome: postcards and calendars, coffee cups and silk cloths, plates and plastic gadgets of every kind, always with the picture of the currently happily reigning Holy Father—and next to them also those of Popes John Paul II, John XXIII, and even Paul VI. There is only one pope you will not find in any of the souvenir shops—and I mean in none, as if there were a conspiracy here. To dig up a postcard with the picture of Benedict XVI requires the tenacity of a private detective. Imperial Rome knew the institution of damnatio memoriae: the extinction of the memory of condemned enemies of the state. Thus, Emperor Caracalla had the name of his brother Geta — after he had killed him—chiseled out of the inscription on the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus. It seems as if the dealers in devotional goods and probably also their customers (for the trade in rosaries also obeys the market laws of supply and demand) had jointly imposed such an ancient Roman damnatio memoriae on the predecessor of the current pope.

It is as if, on this trivial level, should be accomplished that which Benedict himself could not resolve to do after his resignation (disturbing to so many people, profoundly inexplicable and still unexplained)—namely, to become invisible, to enter into an unbroken silence. Those especially who accompanied the pontificate of Benedict XVI with love and hope could not get over the fact that it was this very pope who, with this dramatic step, called into question his great work of reform for the Church. Future generations may be able without anger and enthusiasm to speak about this presumably last chapter in the life of Benedict XVI. The distance in time will place these events in a greater, not yet foreseeable order. For the participating contemporary, however, this distance is not available because he remains defenseless in the face of the immediate consequences of this decision. To speak about Benedict XVI today means first of all trying to overcome these feelings of pain and disappointment.

All the more so, because during his reign this pope undertook to heal the great wounds that had been inflicted on the visible body of the Church in the time after the Council. The party that had assembled against tradition at the Council viewed the compromise formulas that had settled the conflict in many conciliar documents only as stages in the grand war for the future shape of the Church. The “spirit of the Council” began to be played off against the literal text of the conciliar decisions. Disastrously, the implementation of the conciliar decrees was caught up in the cultural revolution of 1968, which had broken out all over the world. That was certainly the work of a spirit—if only of a very impure one. The political subversion of every kind of authority, the aesthetic vulgarity, the philosophical demolition of tradition not only laid waste universities and schools and poisoned the public atmosphere but at the same time took possession of broad circles within the Church. Distrust of tradition, elimination of tradition began to spread in, of all places, an entity whose essence consists totally of tradition—so much so that one has to say the Church is nothing without tradition. So the post-conciliar battle that had broken out in so many places against tradition was nothing else but the attempted suicide of the Church—a literally absurd, nihilistic process. We all can recall how bishops and theology professors, pastors and the functionaries of Catholic organizations proclaimed with a confident victorious tone that with the Second Vatican Council a new Pentecost had come upon the Church—which none of those famous Councils of history which had so decisively shaped the development of the Faith had ever claimed. A “new Pentecost” means nothing less than a new illumination, possibly one that would surpass that received two thousand years ago; why not advance immediately to the “Third Testament” from the Education of the Human Race 2) of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing? In the view of these people, Vatican II meant a break with the Tradition as it existed up till then, and this breach was salutary. Whoever listened to this could have believed that the Catholic religion had found itself really only after Vatican II. All previous generations—to which we who sit here owe our faith—are supposed to have remained in an outer courtyard of immaturity.

To be fair, we should remember that the popes attempted to counter this — with a weak voice and above all without the will to intervene in these aberrations with an organizing hand as the ruler of the Church. Only a very few individual heresiarchs were disciplined—those who with their arrogant insolence practically forced their own reprimand. But the great mass of the “new Pentecostals,” unrestrained and protected by widespread networks, could continue to exercise a tremendous influence on the day-to-day life of the Church. So, for outside observers, the claim that with Vatican II the Church had broken with her past became ever more probable. Anyone accustomed to trusting his eyes and ears could no longer convince himself that this was still the Church that had remained faithful for thousands of years, through all the changes of the ages. The German Catholic legal scholar Carl Schmitt made the following scornful rhyme: “Heraclitus taught that all things flow; the rock of Peter—it’s flowing too.” 3) An iconoclastic attack like the worst years of the Reformation swept through the churches; in the seminaries the “demythologizing of Christianity” à la Bultmann was propagated; the end of priestly celibacy was celebrated as something imminent; religious instruction was largely abandoned, even in Germany, which had been highly favored in this regard; priests gave up clerical attire; the sacred language — which the liturgical constitution of the Council had just solemnly confirmed 4) — was abandoned. All this happened, so it was said, to prepare for the future, otherwise the faithful couldn’t be kept in the Church. The hierarchy argued like the proprietors of a department store, who didn’t want to sit on their wares and so tossed them out to the people at throwaway prices. Regrettably the comparison isn’t exact, for the people had no interest in the discounted products. After the “new Pentecost” there began an exodus out of the Church, the monasteries, and the seminaries. The Church unrestrainedly pushing ahead with her revolution, continued to lose both attractiveness and retentive capacity.

She resembled that baffled tailor who, looking at a badly cut pair of trousers while shaking his head, muttered: “I’ve cut you off three times and you’re still too short!” It is claimed that this exodus from the Church would also have happened without the revolution. Let’s conditionally accept for the moment this claim. If that had really been the case, however, the great revolution would not have been necessary at all. On the contrary, the flock remaining in the Church would have been able to persevere in faith under the “sign that will be contradicted” (Lk 2:34). There’s not one argument in favor of the post-conciliar revolution; I certainly haven’t encountered any yet.

Pope Benedict could not and would never allow himself to think in that way, even if in lonely hours it may have been difficult for him to defend himself against an assault of such thoughts. In no way did he want to abandon the image of the Church as a harmoniously growing organism under the protection of the Holy Spirit. With his historical consciousness it was also clear to him that history can never be turned back, that it is impossible as well as reckless to try to make what has happened “unhappen.” Even the God who forgives sins does not make them “undone,” but in the best case lets them become a felix culpa. From this perspective, Benedict could not accept what the progressives and traditionalists expressed equally and with the best reasons: that in the post-conciliar era a decisive break with Tradition had indeed occurred; that the Church before and after the Council was not the same institution. That would have meant that the Church was no longer under the guidance of the Holy Spirit; consequently, she had ceased to be the Church. One cannot imagine the theologian Joseph Ratzinger as laboring under a naive, formalistic faith. The twists and turns of ecclesiastical history were very familiar to him. That in the past, too, there had been in the Church bad popes, misguided theologians, and questionable circumstances was never hidden from him. But, while contemplating ecclesiastical history, he felt borne up by the indisputable impression that the Church, in constant development, had again and again overcome her crises not simply by cutting off mistaken developments but by making them, if possible, even fruitful in the succeeding generations.

It thus appeared to him imperative to combat the idea that this rupture had really occurred—even if all the appearances seemed to argue for it. His efforts aimed at attempting to remove from men’s minds the assertion of such a rupture. This attempt has an air of legal positivism 5) about it, a disregarding of the facts. Please do not understand it as irony when I quote in this context the famous lines of the great absurdist poet Christian Morgenstern: “what may not be, cannot be!” 6) The Church can never exist in contradiction to itself, to tradition, to revelation, to the doctrines of the Fathers and to the totality of the Councils. This she cannot do; even when it appears as if indeed she has done so, it is a false appearance. A more profound hermeneutic will finally always prove that the contradiction was not a real one. An inexhaustible confidence in the action of the Holy Spirit resides in this attitude. A cynical outside observer could speak of a “holy slyness.” In any case, this standpoint can be justified from both perspectives: that of trust in God and that of Machiavellianism. For a glance at ecclesiastical history shows that the continuation of the Church was always connected with a firm faith (or at least a fearlessly asserted fiction) that the Holy Spirit guided the Church in every phase. What Pope Benedict called the “hermeneutic of rupture” — whether asserted by the traditionalist or progressive side — was for him an attack on the essence of the Church, which consists of continuity without a rupture. Therefore he would always talk of the concept of a “hermeneutic of continuity.” That was not so much a theological program nor a foundation for concrete decisions but an attempt to win others over to an attitude of mind—the only one from which a recovery of the Church could arise. When, finally, all would have understood that the Church does not and cannot rely on ruptures and revolutions, then the hierarchy and theologians would, of their own accord, find their way back to a harmonious development of Tradition.

From these thoughts speaks an almost Far Eastern wisdom, a principled distrust of all manipulations and the conviction that decrees issued from a desk cannot end a spiritual crisis. “Les choses se font en ne les faisant pas.” No Chinese said that but the French foreign minister Talleyrand, who after all was a Catholic bishop. “Things get done by doing nothing” 7) — that’s an everyday experience; everyone may have encountered it once. But it is also a profound insight into the course of history, in which great developments remain uninfluenced by the plans of man — however excitedly the political protagonists in the foreground of the present day may gesticulate. That was what Benedict, as Cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had already criticized in Paul VI’s reform of the Mass. Here organic growth, the development shaped by the imperceptible hand of time, had been interrupted by a bureaucratic act, a “dictatus papae.” It appeared to him to be not just hopeless but even forbidden to try to heal through another dictate this wound that Pope Paul’s attack against Tradition had inflicted. A gradual transformation of thought, proceeding from the contemplation of the model that Benedict gave the world, would create a frame of mind in which the return of Tradition would ensue almost by itself. He trusted in the power of images arising out of his public appearances, where, for example, he employed the Roman Canon or distributed communion on the tongue to the kneeling faithful. To allow truth to act only through “the gentle power” of truth itself, as is stated in the conciliar Declaration on Religious Liberty 8) — this maxim corresponded both to his temperament and to his conviction.

A characteristic expression of his approach was his care for overcoming the many aberrations in the liturgy that obscured the Eucharistic mystery. He hoped to be able to eliminate the abuses through a “reform of the reform.” “Reform” — now that’s something the justification for which is completely understandable. Everyone demands, after all, continuous economic, political, and social reforms. Indeed, wasn’t “reform of the reform” well-nigh an intensification of this positive word, an expression of the maxim ecclesia semper reformanda? And wasn’t an evaluation and reassessment of the ad experimentum phase which the liturgy had gone through since its revision by Paul VI also necessary? The progressives, however, were not deceived regarding the innocuousness of this “reform” initiative. They recognized even the first ever-so-cautious steps of the Cardinal and even more so those of the Pope as a danger for the three great objectives of the revolution in the Mass (even thought the popes had already contested all three). What Benedict wanted to achieve would stand in the way of the desacralization, the Protestantizing, and the anthropomorphic democratization of the rite. What struggles were involved just in eliminating the many errors in the translations of the missal into modern languages! The philologically absolutely clear falsification of the words of institution, the well-known conflict over the pro multis of the consecration, which even with the best (and worst) of wills cannot mean pro omnibus, has not yet been resolved in Germany. 9) The English-speaking and Romance worlds had submitted, more or less gnashing their teeth, while for the Germans, the theory of universal salvation, one of the dearest offspring of the post-conciliar era, was endangered! That at least a third of the Gospel of Matthew consists of proclamations of eternal damnation so terror-inducing that one can hardly sleep after reading them was a matter of indifference to the propagandists of the “new mercy” — regardless of the fact that they had justified their struggle against Tradition by the desire to break through historical overgrowth and encrustation to the sources of the “authentic” Jesus.

The same thing happened to another central cause of Benedict’s—one that really didn’t touch Pope Paul’s reform of the Mass. As is well known, that reform did not require a change in the direction of the celebration. The liturgical scholar Klaus Gamber, admired by Pope Benedict, had given the scholarly proof that in no period of the Church’s history had the liturgical sacrifice been made facing the people instead of facing East, together with the people, to the returning Lord. Already as Cardinal, Pope Benedict had pointed out again and again how greatly the Mass had been distorted and its meaning obscured by the celebration’s false orientation. He said that Mass celebrated facing the people conveyed the impression that the congregation is not oriented towards God, but celebrates itself. This correct insight, I admit, never made it either into a binding document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or into papal legislation. Here too, truth was supposed to prevail through the “gentle force of truth” — so appeared the rule of the “Panzerkardinal” or “God’s Rottweiler” (or whatever other compliments public opinion dreamed up for Pope Benedict). The consequences of the effects of this “gentle power” are today apparent to everyone. The unique hope of the present Curia, the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Cardinal Sarah, who teaches and acts in Benedict’s spirit, has nothing in his hands with which to turn into reality the mission he inherited from Benedict. “Reform of the reform,” which always was just a set phrase instead of a policy, is now even forbidden as a phrase. 10)

Is it then still worthwhile to ask, how, realistically, the “reform of the reform” might have looked? In any case, Pope Benedict did not think of calling into question the use of the vernacular. He considered this to be irreversible, even if he might have greeted the spread of occasional Latin Masses. Correcting the incorrect orientation of celebrating the Mass was very important for him, likewise the reception of communion on the tongue (likewise not abolished by the missal of Paul VI). He favored the use of the Roman Canon — also not prohibited today. If he had, moreover, thought of putting into the new missal the extremely important offertory prayers of the traditional rite, one could say that the reform of the reform was nothing but a return to the post-conciliar missal of 1965 which Pope Paul himself had promulgated before his drastic reform of the Mass. In regard to the 1966 edition of the Schott missal 11), the Cardinal Secretary of State at that time, Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, specifically wrote: “The singular characteristic and crux of this new edition is its perfected union with the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.” 12) What drove Pope Paul to disregard the missal he himself had promulgated and shortly thereafter to publish a new missal—one which no longer corresponded to the task set by the Council—is among the great puzzles of recent church history. One thing is certain: if things had remained as they were in the 1965 version, which although inflicting many senseless sacrifices, left the rite as a whole untouched, the rebellion of the great Archbishop Lefebvre would never have occurred. But one other thing is also true: even today nothing prevents a priest from including in his celebration of the Mass the most important components that could have been anticipated from a “reform of the reform”: ad orientem celebration, communion on the tongue, the Roman Canon, the occasional use of Latin. According to the books of the Church this is possible even today, although in an individual congregation it requires considerable courage and authority to find the way back to this form without support from Rome. I want to say that the reform of the reform would not have been a tremendous achievement; it would not have won back many spiritual treasures of the old Rite. But it certainly would have led to a change in the atmosphere—it would have allowed the spirit of adoration and of sacred space to arise again. When an individual priest undertakes this in a parish alone and on his own account, he risks an exhausting struggle with his superior and trouble with his liturgy committee. Thus, that which is possible and permitted quickly becomes practically impossible. How helpful would be a single papal document that recommended ad orientem celebration!

While entertaining (perhaps pointless) thoughts regarding “what would have happened, if…,” it may be appropriate to recall what would have been more important still than work on ritual details. Anyone who has dealt more thoroughly with the great crisis of the liturgy in the twentieth century knows that it didn’t simply fall down from heaven or rise up out of hell. Rather, there were developments reaching into the far past that finally led to the catastrophe: a mindset which, looked at in isolation, doesn’t seem dangerous at first, cannot be understood as simply anti-liturgical and anti-sacral, and can be found even today among some friends of the traditional rite. One could call it Roman-juristic thought or misunderstood scholastic analytic thought. In any case, it was a manner of thinking and perceiving that was completely foreign to the first Christian millennium that formed the rite. According to this view, some parts in the rite are essential and others less important. For the mindset influenced by this theology of the Mass, the concept of “validity” is critical. It is a concept derived from the realm of civil law, which inquires into the prerequisites that have to be present for a legal action to be valid, and those things that do not contribute to this validity. This perspective necessarily leads to a reduction, a formal minimalism that only wants to know whether the minimal prerequisites for the validity of a certain Mass exist. Under the influence of this understanding, reductive forms of the rite were created early on, for example, the “low Mass.” We can certainly love it, but we cannot forget that it represents a conceptual impossibility for the Church of the first millennium, which continues to live in the various Orthodox churches. Choral music is prescribed for the Orthodox celebrant even when he celebrates alone. For the liturgy moves man into the sphere of the angels, the angels who sing. And the men who sing the songs of the angels, the Sanctus and the Gloria, take the place of the angels, as the Eastern liturgies expressly state. The low Mass developed when, in monasteries, several priests celebrated at the same time at different altars. Easily understandable practical considerations sought to avoid musical chaos. But you only have to have been in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem to experience that in the spiritual world of the first millennium practical considerations had no legitimacy in matters of the opus Dei, the liturgy. Greek Orthodox, Egyptian Copts, and Armenians sing at different altars each in their own chant, until a holy noise fills the space. Admittedly, that may confuse, perhaps even repel people of the North in their search for Protestant inwardness and contemplation—especially when from a nearby mosque the call of the muezzin gets mixed into the whole. What interests us here is that even in the face of such jarring consequences, the Eastern liturgies could not even imagine a minimalization, a “reduction to the essentials,” the omission of elements that do not concern the consecration, etc.

To summarize, the essential distinction between the thought of the ancient Church and the more recent Western Latin conceptions consists in the understanding of the consecration of the offerings. Ancient Christian belief understood the entire liturgy in all its parts as “consecrating.” The presence of Christ in the liturgy is not centered only on the words of consecration in the strict sense, but, runs through the entire liturgy in different forms till it experiences its summit in the form of the sacrificial death made present in the consecration.

Certainly, whoever understands the Mass in this way does not think of reduction and even less of arbitrary interventions, for, from the outset, the presence of Christ excludes any arbitrary arranging and staging by man. It was the new Western way of perceiving the “real” sacred act as narrowed down to the consecration that handed over the Mass to the planners’ clutches. But liturgy has this in common with art: within its sphere there is no distinction between the important and the unimportant. All parts of a painting by a master are of equal significance, none can be dispensed with. Just imagine, in regard to Raphael’s painting of St. Cecilia, wanting only to recognize the value of the face and hands, because they are “important,” while cutting off the musical instruments at her feet because they are “unimportant.”

What is decisive, however, is that the Latin world reached this opinion against the facts of its own liturgy, which spoke a totally other, increasingly incomprehensible language. Not only the Orthodox but also the Roman liturgy consists of a gradual increase of the Lord’s presence, culminating in the consecration. But this is precisely not in the form of a division separating the parts before the consecration from those afterwards—just as the life of Christ is not separated from its climax, the sacrificial death, but logically leads up to it. Christ recalled and made present is the theme of the Latin liturgy from is first moments; the language of its symbols permits no other interpretation. The liturgy had taken over from the court ceremonial of the pagan emperors the symbolic language for the presence of the supreme sovereign: candles, which preceded the emperor, and the thurible. Whenever candles and incense appear in the liturgy, they indicate a new culmination of the divine presence. The priest himself, as he enters upon his liturgical function, is an alter Christus, a part of the great work of theurgy, “God-creation,” 13) as the liturgy has been called. He represents the Christ of Palm Sunday, who festively enters into Jerusalem, but also Christ come again on the last day, surrounded by the symbols of majesty. At the reading of the Gospel the candles of the Gospel procession and the incensing of the Gospel book as well as of the celebrating priest once more indicate the presence of the teaching Christ. The readings are not simply a “proclamation” but above all the creation of a presence. Then the offertory gifts, hidden by the chalice veil, are brought to the altar and are reverently received and incensed. The prayers that are recited at this moment can be understood to mean that these gifts, even though unconsecrated, just by reason of their having been set aside already have the role of representing Christ preparing for his sacrificial death. Thus, the liturgical understanding of the first millennium interpreted the removal of the chalice veil on the altar as a representation of the moment in which Christ was stripped of his garments.

The traditional offertory was a particular thorn in the side of the reformers of the Mass. Why these prayers, why these signs of reverence, if the gifts have not yet even been consecrated? A theology of the Mass of the second millennium had stolen in, from whose perspective this offertory had suddenly become incomprehensible, a detail that had been dragged along which only produced embarrassment. Now just appreciate the spirit of reverence of, say, the epoch of the Council of Trent. It had revised the liturgy, but of course did not think at all of changing a liturgical rite because it had been found to be theologically inconsistent. But when this offertory reached the desks of the unfortunate twentieth century, it could finally be eliminated. One senses the satisfaction of the reformer with having eliminated the nonsense of millennia with one stroke of the pen. It would have been so easy, on the other hand, to recognize the offertory as a ritual of re-presentation if one had glanced over at the Orthodox ritual. But Roman arrogance preserved us from such digressions. It haughtily ignored the fact that one cannot make any competent statement concerning the Roman rite unless one also keeps an eye on the Orthodox rite. In it, the offertory is celebrated in a far more festive and detailed way, precisely because it is considered part of the consecration. Why did no one [at the time of the reform] wonder why the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit at the consecration of the gifts, is part of the offertory in the Latin rite? 14) That the liturgy thus contains a clear sign that the consecration has already begun at that point? But the more profound understanding of the liturgical process had already been so largely lost that one felt able to throw away that which one could no longer understand as if it were a meaningless frill. It must have been an exalted feeling, as a member of a future generation, to be able so blithely to cut down to size the greatest pope in history, St. Gregory the Great! Allow me here to cite an atheistic writer, the brilliant Stalinist Peter Hacks, who said regarding the question of revising classical plays: “the best way to revise classic plays is to understand them.” A principle already heeded in literature — how much more so should it be when it involves the liturgy, the greatest treasure we possess? Among the greatest achievements of Pope Benedict was directing the Church’s attention once more to Orthodoxy. He knew that all the striving towards ecumenism, however necessary, must begin not with attention-grabbing meetings with Eastern hierarchs but with the restoration of the Latin liturgy, which represents the real connection between the Latin and Greek churches. Now, in the meantime, we have realized that all such initiatives were in vain—especially because it wasn’t death that interrupted them, but a capitulation long before one was sure that irreversible facts had been created.

The disappointment over the shocking end of the Benedictine pontificate is all too understandable, but threatens to obscure a sober view of the facts. Just imagine what the liturgical reality would be if Pope Bergoglio had immediately succeeded John Paul II. Even if the dearest cause of Pope Benedict, the reform of the reform, has failed, he remains a pope of the liturgy, possibly, hopefully, the great savior of the liturgy. His motu proprio truly earned the designation “of his own volition.” For there was nobody — or very, very few — in the curia and in the world episcopacy who would have stood at the side of the Pope in this matter. Both the progressive side and regrettably also the “conservative” side (one has grown accustomed to putting this word in quotation marks) implored Pope Benedict not to grant the traditional rite any more freedom beyond the possibilities created unwillingly by John Paul II. Pope Benedict, who with his whole being distrusted isolated papal decisions, in this case overcame himself and spoke an authoritative word. And then, with the rules of implementation for Summorum Pontificum, he created guarantees, anchored in canon law, that secured for the traditional rite a firm place in the life of the Church. That is still just a first step, but it was a conviction of this pope, whose spiritual seriousness cannot be denied, that the true growth of liturgical consciousness cannot be commanded. Rather, it must take place in many souls; faith in tradition must be proved in many places throughout the world. Now it is incumbent on every individual to take up the possibilities made available by Pope Benedict. Against overwhelming opposition he opened a floodgate. Now the water has to flow, and no one who holds the liturgy to be an essential component of the Faith can dispense himself from this task. The liturgy IS the Church—every Mass celebrated in the traditional spirit is immeasurably more important than every word of every pope. It is the red thread that must be drawn through the glory and misery of Church history; where it continues, phases of arbitrary papal rule will become footnotes of history. Don’t the progressives secretly suspect that their efforts will remain in vain so long as the Church’s memory of her source of life survives? Just realize in how many places in the world the traditional rite is celebrated since the motu proprio; how many priests who do not belong to traditional orders have meanwhile learned the old rite; how many bishops have confirmed and ordained in the old rite. Germany—the land from which so many impulses harmful to the Church have issued—regrettably cannot be listed here in first place. But Catholics must think universally! Who would have believed it possible twenty years ago that there would be held in St. Peter’s, at the Cathedra Petri, a pontifical Mass in the old rite? I admit that that is little, far too little—a small phenomenon in the entirety of the world Church. Nevertheless, while soberly contemplating the gigantic catastrophe that has occurred in the Church, we do not have the right to place little value on exceptions to the sorrowful rule. The totality of the progressive claims has been broken—that is the work of Pope Benedict XVI. And whoever laments that Pope Benedict did not do more for the good cause, that he used his papal authority too sparingly, in all realism let him ask himself who among the cardinals with realistic chances to become pope would have done more for the old rite than he did. And the result of these reflections can only be gratitude for the unfortunate pope, who in the most difficult of times did what was in his power. And his memory is secure, if not in evidence among the items of devotional kitsch at the pilgrims’ stores around St Peter’s. For whenever we have the good fortune to participate in a traditional Mass, we will have to think of Benedict XVI.

1. Translated by Stuart Chessman; annotated by Peter Kwasniewski. Lecture given on April 1, 2017 at the 18th Cologne International Liturgical Conference, Herzogenrath. This lecture by Mr. Mosebach will also be published as a Foreword to Dr. Peter Kwasniewski’s new book, Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages, forthcoming from Angelico Press.”

2. A work of the Enlightenment, published in 1780, that asserted a threefold development or “education” of mankind through the successive stages of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Modern Age.

5. “etwas Dezisionistisches.” “Decisionism” is a legal philosophy which determines the validity of an act or law solely from the fact that the proper authority has decided it. This may be traced back to the voluntarism of William of Ockham and the political theory of Thomas Hobbes; it is most clearly formulated by Carl Schmitt.

8. The phrase Mosebach has in mind is Dignitatis Humanae §1: nec aliter veritatem sese imponere nisi vi ipsius veritatis, quae suaviter simul ac fortiter mentibus illabitur. In Prof. Michael Pakaluk’s translation: “Nor is there any other way for truth to impose itself except by the force of truth itself, which penetrates sweetly and yet at the same time strongly into the human mind.”

9. This, in spite of the April 14, 2012 letter that Pope Benedict XVI addressed to Archbishop Robert Zollitsch (and through him, the German Bishops’ Conference) explaining why pro multis must be translated “for many” in all vernacular liturgical books.

10. See, e.g., Holy See Press Office Communiqué of July 7, 2016: “New liturgical directives are not expected from next Advent, as some have incorrectly inferred from some of Cardinal Sarah’s words, and it is better to avoid using the expression ‘reform of the reform’ with reference to the liturgy, given that it may at times give rise to error.” Pope Francis made similar remarks in an interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J. that was published as the preface of Nei tuoi occhi è la mia parola (Rizzoli, 2016), a collection of his main talks and homilies as archbishop of Buenos Aires.

11. The “Schott” is a well-known German-Latin daily missal for the use of the faithful. It has gone through many editions.

12. Eigenart und Kernpunkt dieser Neubearbeitung ist der vollzogene Anschluß an die Liturgiekonstitution des Konzils. This statement, in a letter addressed to the Abbot of Beuron by Cardinal Cicognani on behalf of Pope Paul VI, was later printed as a foreword to the Schott missal, before it was rendered obsolete by the march of events.

13. Gottesschöpfung, in the sense that the priest and the liturgy make God become present or appear.

Today a friend asked me for the contact information of Helmut Rückriegel; I soon found to my great sorrow and surprise that he had died on January 25 of this year! I unfortunately only had a few occasions to meet Ambassador Rückriegel. He would visit New York where his son lived. I would meet him in a restaurant in the company of his friend Arkady Nebolsine. Helmut Rückriegel was a true Christian gentleman. A man of great culture, he had represented his country in various assignments – notably in Israel and Thailand. Possessed of a keen intelligence and a great sense of the real, he had the ability to understand and appreciate the merits of other peoples and cultures without falling into the servile obsequiousness so typical of the West and particularly of Germany today. Devoted to the Church and to the Traditional mass, he was utterly without the “churchy” Catholic’s cant and fawning airs. Ambassador Rückriegel had put his practical talents to use in promoting the Traditional Latin Mass – he held a leading role for years in the Una Voce Federation. To me he seemed a reminder of a bygone age, of the former greatness of German culture – which in its great days had sought to comprehend and embrace all the cultures of the world. I regret so much that through my own fault I had not had the chance to get to know him better!

Martin Mosebach has written the following obituary.

Obituary for Helmut Rückriegel by Martin Mosebach

An extraordinary man has left the earth. Standing at the grave of Helmut Rückriegel his friends conceive the whole truth of the discernment that with the death of a man there is a whole world that perishes. What pertains to everyone is most evident for such an overabundant nature as it was with our deceased friend Helmut. He was allowed to live a long life, and, we can say, to live in mindfulness and intensity. He finished the wine of life completely and entirely, including even the very last and then most bitter drops. Furthermore it was granted to him to maintain his entire strength of mind until his last moment; in complete alertness he witnessed his time and all its phenomena until the last moment. His participation in the world was insatiable; he was a pious Christian – the archaic term ‘piety’ in its comprehensive meaning like the antiquity knew it – was fitting for him. A life in the presence of the supernatural and a joyful discovering of this supernatural in the inexhaustible statures of the created world – but without suppressing the reality of the mortality of all life on earth, he lived as if there was no death.

Until his painful last sickbed he was seized with the fascination of languages – recently he started to learn Turkish, a language that is extremely far from all Indo-Germanic familiarity – joyfully entering into a totally different kind of thinking and feeling. I always wondered why he, whose sense of language was infallible, did not write himself. But in return his sentiment for the great German poetry was so profound that the verses of Goethe and the Romantics, of Hölderlin and Stefan George constituted deeply and totally his inner life. He was the reader and reciter that poets desired, drawing from a great pool effortlessly the most remote lyric creations to engender an awakening to melody and life.

His artist’s nature became apparent in the invention of his garden that he created in Niedergründau, the village where he came from, after the end of his working life: he cultivated rambler roses, growing into the old, partly withered apple trees high as a house, to create real snow avalanches of white blossoms; in May and June they were phantasmagorias of surreal, sheer beauty. Here, the gardener who planted hundreds of sumptuous roses, turned into a wizard. ‘Il faut cultiver son jardin.’ are the last words of Candide, Voltaire’s wicked satire in which the hero, after having underwent the horrors of a world falling to pieces, is forming the conclusion of his experiences. And it was in this awareness that Helmut created his garden. The experiences of this great connoisseur of the art of living had made him learn, no less clear than Voltaire’s Candide, that the earth is not a peaceful place, not a paradise.

As a pupil and young man during the years of Nazism he thanked his teachers for the discernment that Germany was ruled by criminals; in these years he also experienced the Catholic Church as a place of resistance against the despotism. As a diplomat he travelled widely; but his most important positions for him were in New York and Israel – in the Holy Land, this small spot of earth, where also in his life all spiritual and demonic forces that agitate us as well today, collide; there he found the proximity of the truth of his faith, especially there, where it seemed to be completely unreachable. And very early he discovered for him the obligation to serve the Roman Catholic Church, his mother, for whom he saw himself as a faithful son, in her great crisis in which she had fallen after the Second Vatican Council. Helmut Rückriegel, who loved the oriental Churches, especially the Orthodoxy, the friend of many Jews, who – together with his friend, the great Annemarie Schimmel, admired the Sufism; he was a Catholic, as ‘the tree is green’ to say it with a word of Carl Schmitt. From his universal culture, from his enthusiasm for the masterworks of language, from his detailed knowledge of history and the cultures of the world Helmut Rückriegel was convinced that the Roman Church was – by its cult which has been transmitted from the late antiquity – a melting pot of all beauty and holiness that is possible on earth. In a decades-long friendship with Josef Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI., he helped to ensure that the Church did not completely abandon this treasure that belongs not to her alone, but to the whole mankind.

Helmut Rückriegel the diplomat must occasionally have been rather undiplomatic – he was full of passion, a battler who did not spare himself and his adversaries. A man made for being happy – but still often enough desperate of the vainness of all struggles of the best, putting up resistance against the spirit of the times. The old Helmut Rückriegel did not become wise of age – a wonderful trait he had and that conjoined him with his younger friends. A consistent one, also in his matrimony that lasted nearly fifty years: after his rich life that she shared for so long with him, Brigitte Rückriegel accompanied him faithfully unto death – for this long companionship and the synergy during the working years in many positions she is, as she told me, profoundly grateful, and Helmut’s friends have today to be grateful to her for all that she did for him, especially during the darksome days.

The cosmopolitan German patriot Helmut Rückriegel embodied the best aspects of Germany; to have known him is for me and certainly for many others an infinite well of encouragement and hope.

In the United States Martin Mosebach, the liturgical essayist, is well known. Martin Mosebach, the novelist and writer, is far less known. After all, it was only two years ago that one of his novels, What Was Before, was translated into English for the first time. Mosebach has now published Life is Short: Twelve Bagatelles, a collection of his shorter and shortest fiction. If it were only translated, it would be for the American reader an ideal concentrated introduction to the style of Martin Mosebach.

Life is Short gathers previously published short works. In general, I would categorize them as “prose poems” rather than short stories. Rather than presenting a narrative or character, the miniatures in Life is Short describe an object, capture a mood or a moment – often in an indirect, indeterminate way. One thinks of such remote antecedents as Arthur Machen’s Ornaments in Jade (1897) or J-K Huysmans’ Drageoir aux Épices (1874). Mosebach’s style, however, if “poetic” in the use of sound and images, is more restrained and precise. And, as in Mosebach’s novels, here and there is satire and even comedy.

As to things, Life is Short offers numerous descriptions of objects as diverse as a bicycle, a pigeon egg or the wreckage of an (apparently) abandoned barber shop. Mosebach endows mere things with new significance, even (in the case of the bicycle) a life of their own. As William Carlos Williams put it:

“So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow….”

But has not this kind of imagery always been a particular excellence of the author? One remembers so well the sacred cow in Das Beben, or the descriptions of a nightingale and later of the cockatoo in Was Davor Geschah.

These “bagatelles” also capture fleeting, uncertain and sometimes deceptive moments of life such as a boy’s exhilarating bicycle ride downhill after a hard day at school or the glimpse of a mysterious stranger sitting in a train compartment by a rider standing on the platform. If life is short, even more brief are the few moments that allow us insight into in it.

Some of the pieces in Life is Short assume the form of a short story. A tale of an artist and her friend discussing the components of a still life unexpectedly turns unsettling, even menacing. A visit to a dying deserted French town climaxing in a mysterious late night conversation leaves the story’s narrator perplexed as to what he as seen or imagined.

Yes, life is short – but art is long. If you want to get to know Mosebach the artist, this is a good place to start. But what of Mosebach the Catholic advocate, the inspiring writer on the liturgy? In the following brief final section of “Vinusse: Eight Wine Labels and a Prologue,” the author does more explicitly present liturgical and theological themes in an anecdote that takes place in his own backyard, near Frankfurt. It’s a tale that also leaves us with a kind of commentary on the meaning of this little book.

The Wine of Sacrifice

The biretta of the monsignor hung from the hat rack in the foyer. Its glowing crimson pompom was the only sign of baroque pleasure in color in the severe scholar’s dwelling. The old theologian regarded not as old-fashioned ballast, but as extraordinarily meaningful, that, as is often the case in the Rheingau, a vineyard was attached to the rectory. In this way a gift, the purity of which he well knew, entered the gothic chalice with which he offered the sacrifice.

The walls of his study were covered up to the ceiling with brown rows of books. The complete edition of Migne’s church fathers, bound in black-waxed linen, was ready at hand. The afternoon sun created small foci of light in the wine glasses that stood before us.

“This wine is the best that wine can become” said the cleric. “Firne-wine. Once upon a time these wines were desired but today nobody understands anything about them. People believe they have gone bad. And indeed they taste totally different. In many of my Rieslings the Firne sets in just after six or eight years, with others only after twelve or fifteen. The wine grows darker and there develops a taste of fine Spanish snuff tobacco: a hint of turpentine, a breath of noble resin pervades the wine like a marriage, made only in the imagination, between wine and incense. Maybe the wine, impatient and desperate at having to wait for its use in the Sacrifice, undertakes itself an attempt at auto-transubstantiation.

He hadn’t joked, but nevertheless smiled.

“Wine, after all, has been meant for sacrifice from the beginning. When wine was offered in the room of the last supper in Jerusalem that was done not out of the inspiration of the moment but in conscious remembrance of the mysterious, almost prehistoric priest-king Melchizedek, who had likewise made an offering of bread and wine. The matter of a sacrifice is not at our disposal. It is very true: visible things are not the final reality, but a kind of writing, by aid of which the invisible appears. An alphabet has letters that cannot be switched. Like all heresies, the idea arose early on that other substances could replace wine. Around 200 A.D. there was a sect in the Near East – the Aquarians – that in the Christian sacrifice used water instead of wine. To his everlasting fame, St. Cyprian of Carthage put the Aquarians’ madness in its place. Although my Firne – wine is only twenty years old, the Firne endows it with an ancient character. Therefore, with it I greet Saint Cyprian and his struggle against godless anti-sensuousness.”

When it became apparent in the early 1950s that television sets would soon be in many households, German bishops deliberated about whether it would be wise to allow or even promote television broadcasts of the Holy Mass. Indeed, people thought about such questions sixty years ago and they asked the great philosopher Josef Pieper for an expert opinion. In his opinion, Pieper rejected such television broadcasts on principle, saying they were irreconcilable with the nature of the Holy Mass. In its origins, the Holy Mass is a discipline of the arcane, a sacred celebration of mysteries by the christened. He mentioned the lowest level in the order of priests – done away with following the Second Vatican Council – the ostiary, or doorkeeper, who once had to ensure that the non-baptized and those temporarily excluded leave the church and move to the narthex following the liturgy of the Word. The Orthodox still do so in some places; the call of the deacon, “Guard the doors” is heard in every Orthodox liturgy before the Eucharist. While in Georgia I once experienced this demand, often merely a ceremony of a recollected past, being taken literally. A monk approached me, fell to his knees and apologetically asked me to leave the church since I, as a Roman Catholic, was not in full agreement with the Orthodox Church. I gladly acquiesced as I think not everyone has to be permitted everywhere all the time. Sacred places and holy acts are first declared quite plainly by the drawing of boundaries and such boundaries must somehow be visible and palpable. Still, anyone who has not given any thought to the dubiousness of filming the Mass has perhaps on occasion felt uncomfortably moved when they saw believers receiving communion on television or as the camera rested on the face of a celebrant chewing the host. Are such feelings truly only atavistic, produced by ancient magical fears? Other cultures are also acquainted with an aversion to photography. It is as if it would disturb a spiritual sphere.

So it is all the more surprising that a photograph of a Mass has become very valuable to me. I always have it in view on my desk. It is a black and white picture of a church interior badly damaged by bombs; massive columns still bear a vaulted ceiling but the rear wall of the church is completely collapsed, providing a view of a burnt-out neighborhood lying in ruins. The piles of stone almost penetrate the interior of the church. But the chessboard floor around the altar has been cleared. Three clerics are standing behind one another in a row on the altar steps wearing the large chasubles and dalmatics of the modern “Beuron” style. The open mass book is on the right side of the altar; we can see by the position of the celebrants that they are at the Kyrie at the beginning of the Mass. To one side, in front of a column damaged by bomb fragments, stands the credence table, flanked right and left by two adult acolytes in cassocks and rochets. The congregation is not visible; it must have been quite a distance from the altar. A great feast is being celebrated here as the High Mass reveals. The world has literally collapsed, but the calendar of the Church year mandates this feast. It is celebrated wholly regardless of the circumstances of the times. These circumstances, as disastrous as they are, retreat for the duration of the liturgical feast. In a unique way, my photograph captures the collapse of two dimensions of time: the horrors of war (who knows in what way the five men in this document have been affected, who of them have lost relatives and homes?) and at the same time an exit from this time. It is an exit from the merciless power of their suffering, a turning away from the hopelessness of contemporaneity, not influenced by delusion, but in the awareness that the reality opened up to us by the liturgy is always present, that it perseveres, as if only separated from the present by a thin membrane, through all epochs of world history in one eternal Now. And this Now is entered by the partakers of the Mass through the portal of the 42nd Psalm, which is about the discernatio between the supplicant and the “gens non sancta.” Through this distinction, the people, all of whom belong to the gens non sancta, become a holy people for the duration of the liturgy; the actual circumstances of their existence, whether the horrors of destruction or the self-sufficient satiety of peace-time, dissolve at this boundary crossed in the liturgy. The focus of the celebrants on the cross and the altar denotes a simultaneous turning-away. Standing in a row, they are like a procession that has come to a halt – come to a halt because it has attained its highest possible objective on earth.

Measured against the two-thousand year history of the Church, this is not an old picture. It is not yet seventy years old but still seems endlessly far away from us today. An image of such radicalness in its triumphant insistence in the positing of a counter-world would not be photographable today without further ado, at least not in the world of the Roman west. It may be more of a possibility among the persecuted Christians of the Orthodox east who have loyally preserved their “divine liturgy.” Anyone looking at this picture must believe that the liturgy it documents is invincible; it has nothing to fear of any disaster.

My bishop has given me a difficult task. He asked me to speak to you about the traditional Roman liturgy, which was the dominant liturgy in the entire Catholic world before it was rewritten by the Second Vatican Council in the late 1960s to an extent that far surpassed the reform mission of that council. It was an unprecedented event in the history of the Church. No pope had ever so profoundly intervened in the liturgy, even though modifications to worship over nearly two thousand years were – perhaps naturally and inevitably – numerous.

If we were to visualize the epochal breaks, the changes in the culture and mentality that Christendom has survived, it would make us dizzy. And indeed, the Church on earth has always been uneasy about whether it still resembles the Nazarene’s foundation. In every century of its existence it has had to measure up anew to its Founder’s prototype and has often enough been threatened to be torn apart – was in fact torn apart – by disputes over what the authentic Church is. The contradiction of the mission it was given has and will never allow it to come to rest.

Christianity is the religion of unrest and of contradiction; it knows no self-soothing. Following Christ means, on the one hand, self-sacrifice, anarchy, dissolving all social bonds, even those of the family, freedom from care, poverty and a love of our enemies that mocks all laws of self-preservation. On the other hand it means passing on the faith, the great mission, helping the poor and the weak. That involves being an institution, becoming a system and apparatus, and that means – in the hour when the Savior appeared – which our faith understands as the “fullness of time” –necessarily becoming Roman.

In every age there have been people who found this contradiction unbearable, who considered the Church’s institutionalization, even more so her becoming Roman, the original sin and who wanted to end this contradiction. The indignation of these people is quite understandable. What they objected to in the institution is often enough undeniable. It is equally undeniable that all Catholics today owe their belief to this institution. They owe to it the long unbroken line of bishops and priests, a spiritual genealogy, which leads to the circle of the Apostles, they owe to it the dissemination of the Holy Books, a scholarly study of them, the object of which is their purity from corruption, they owe to it great architecture that ever allowed them to re-imagine the faith and art that often did more to proclaim the faith than the efforts of the theologians. Within a few centuries in ancient Greece, the image of Apollo transformed from the splendid cruel superman of Homer to the almost abstract principle of truth in Sophocles. The fact that the Apostle Paul and Pope John Paul believed in the same Jesus Christ in spite of all Gnostics, Cathars and Bultmanns, is also owed to this institution.

Being an institution always involves power and an institution is exposed to evil temptations just as every individual is. Yet it was popes and bishops who commissioned images from painters in which popes and bishops were driven into the jaws of hell; probably a unique phenomenon in the iconography of power worldwide. It was popes and bishops who exhibited to the faithful the true way to follow Christ in the form of the Saints. The institution of the Church found its finest justification, however, in passing down the liturgy, which is precisely something other and more than passing down a religious doctrine.

This liturgy, which, by sanctioning the hierarchy, seems to belong altogether to the institutional side of the Church, is what reverses these very contradictions. It allows our faith to be a perceptible personal event, it frees us from the unpredictability of whoever is in power, it bears the possibility of the shocking encounter with the person of Jesus through the ages. Yes, it has changed on its pathway through history, just as the shape of churches changed over the centuries, yet the miracle is still how little it has changed.

The fact that the Church, which embraced many nations, had one religious language in which the sacred texts and commandments were safely preserved, the fact that in carrying out the mysteries the priest and congregation together turn to the east to the risen and returning Christ, the fact that the liturgy is a realization of the redemptive sacrifice on the cross, that the Mass is thus a sacrifice – all of this was completely uncontested in East and West. The Mass seemed destined to triumph over the law of European history of ceaseless revolutions, to be the common thread that connected not only the two thousand past years, but also the years of the future, even if no other stone should remain standing upon the other.

Well, we now know, after 1968, after the reform of the Mass that bears the name of Pope Paul VI, this is no longer the case. According to the liturgical theology of Pope Benedict, the Mass of Paul VI and the largely lost Traditional Mass are one single rite in an ordinary and in an extraordinary form. And although I make no objections to this theology, anyone with eyes and ears is forced to admit that the characters of the two are sometimes so dissimilar that their theoretical unity seems quite unreal. In my experience, the pros and cons of the liturgical reform cannot really be discussed dispassionately within the Church. The fronts long stood against one another with irreconcilable rigidity on this issue, although the idea of ​​ “fronts” presumes comparable strength, which was not the case. The circle of those who refused to accept that what only a moment ago had been everything, should now abruptly become nothing, was miniscule. To put it in the words of theologian Karl Rahner, they were “tragicomic marginal figures who failed in their humanity.” They were regarded as ridiculous and yet highly dangerous. With all the force at his disposal, Pope Benedict tried to defuse the conflict, certainly not for the sake of “peace and quiet,” but to rectify an aberration.

A lot of time has passed since then, and the reform of Paul VI has long since lost its revolutionary character in the lives of Christians around the world. To most Catholics the whole debate over the liturgy of the traditional and the reformed Mass would be entirely incomprehensible today. Consequently a bit of the cantankerousness that this subject long generated has perhaps also vanished. The few people who cannot let go of the traditional liturgy may be a tad ridiculous, but they are certainly no longer dangerous. Thus today my objective is not to continue the dispute over the Catholic liturgy, but to remember; to remember the spiritual process that led to the genesis of the liturgy, one of the most surprising, bizarre, contradictory processes of world history.

In the words of the Apostle Paul, in the Mass the celebrating congregation proclaims “the Lord’s death until He comes.” This death on the cross was, however, an event that was as remote as possible from any celebration and any ceremony and any rite. As much as we have gotten used to gazing at the cross in great works of art, possibly covered with gems in magnificent churches, to wearing it as jewelry or even seeing it as costly or cheap trinkets, we occasionally realize that the reality of the cross was a different one. At times, we must silently agree with the reasoning of aggressive atheists who fight against crucifixes in classrooms and courtrooms under the pretext that the sight of the tortured Christ is a burden, is psychological terrorism. Horror at the sight of the cross can arise in particular from devout earnestness. In the second chapter of volume II of Goethe’s last novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, after committing himself to the creed of Nicaea, the old Unitarian and Spinozist cites the principles of the mysterious educational institution to which Wilhelm hands his son over: “[…] we draw a veil over those sufferings, even because we reverence them so highly. We hold it a damnable audacity to bring forth that torturing Cross, and the Holy One who suffers on it, or to expose them to the light of the sun, which hid its face when a reckless world forced such a sight on it; to take these mysterious secrets, in which the divine depth of Sorrow lies hid, and play with them, fondle them, trick them out, and rest not till the most reverend of all solemnities appears vulgar and paltry.” The Coptic Christians also shy away from open exhibition of the cross. They never attach the body of the Savior to it and they surround it with so many ornaments that it is not recognizable at first glance as a cross, an ornamental veil. The Orthodox focus on Christ Pantocrator, on the icons of the Crucified, Christ stands before the cross rather than hanging on it; just a few drops of blood indicate His wounds. The whole course of events of Jesus’ execution is, indeed, almost unbearable even to non-Christian readers of the passions of the Gospels. A man is made a thing, ousted from the human community; this is an excommunication if ever there was one. The knacker’s yard is the absolute opposite of the temple. Here, the absence of God prevails, nihilism, here the Tortured Himself is racked by doubts over the meaning of His path. Or as Chesterton said so powerfully, “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”

Where out of this impasse does a path lead to ritual and celebration? The temple itself was profaned by this blasphemy, which for outsiders, who have not forgotten awe through pious routine, forms the deeply incomprehensible foundation of a religion of salvation.

This path would not exist if Christ Himself had not pointed it out. He Himself opened the eyes of the disciples for the relation between His slaughter and a feast of sacrifice destined for repetition. He Himself taught them to associate the Last Supper, which already stood in ritual context to the Passover meal, with His bloody sacrificial death the next day. The biblical words spoken by Moses to establish the offering on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and the words of the Eucharist, which proclaim the surrogate sacrifice of Christ’s blood, are nearly identical. Exodus 24:8 says, “Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you.’” In Mark 14:23, Jesus “took a cup […] and said to them ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.’”

This is the clue to the correct understanding of the events: the foundation of a sacrificial ceremony devised for repetition. A rite is an ever-renewed repetition of an act prescribed by an outside will. But the framework within which this foundation should be seen was also clear to the disciples. Paul articulated it when he called Christ the High Priest who, however, no longer absolves the people with the blood of a calf, but with his own blood.

This is a most incredible reinterpretation. For the apostles, however, it was purely an awareness of reality: the slave’s death as an outcast becomes the free sacrificial act of a High Priest. The passio of death on the cross becomes actio – and truly the part of the mass in which the sacrifice of Christ is visualized is called “actio” –, the suffering becomes a deed. The deed of a High Priest: with Christ we have a new way to see reality. Christ brings about knowledge of this reality by thinking in terms of opposites that will not be resolved until the end of human history. It is true that Jesus, bathed in sweat and blood, gasped out his life on the cross. It is just as true that He was the High Priest who sprinkled the world in his blood and with freely raised arms, “took everything on Himself.”

The rite in relation to which His disciples understood His death was, however, highly specific. It was one of the richest and most widely developed rites of the ancient world: the sacrifice of smoke and fire in the temple, performed by a holy priesthood before the Holy of Holies, which housed the Shekinah – the invisible cloud of God made perceptible by the clouds of incense –, which make the air heavier and God’s presence – incorporeal and yet irrefutable – tangible through appealing to our finest sense of smell. Jesus frequently prayed in the temple and his followers, too, left the temple reluctantly to then shape their worship according to the rites and ceremonies of the temple. Indeed, one could say that after the fall of the temple, worship as it was since the book of Leviticus, the liturgical scriptures of the Old Testament, survives only in the Catholic and Orthodox liturgies. But now it must be understood differently in this new transparency of the physical signs of the realities it also contains. This is the new antagonism of Christianity: “All that is transitory is but a metaphor” to say it again in Goethe’s words. But this ability to be symbolic does not lessen the reality of the transitory. After the Son of God became man, matter was given a new dignity that has its own law. It points beyond itself, but is itself already filled with God’s reality. The religion of the resurrection does not recognize an ideal in spirituality that overcomes matter; it recognizes not only the people but also the so-called dead matter as the substance of divine incarnations, so that water and wind and fire can become incarnations, and not merely symbols, of the Holy Spirit. This is the aesthetic of the Catholic liturgy – not to mention the Orthodox. All is symbol and all is quite real, all is merely precursor and all is fulfillment at the same time, all is the past and all is the future and both occur, indistinguishably and simultaneously, in the present.

The temple worship of the Jews was and has remained the covenant duty of the people, for the religion of Jesus Christ did away with nothing; it was never a “reform” in the modern sense. It was now fulfilled in the sense meant for it from the beginning, according to Christian belief, and made apparent in the fullness of time. Just as the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary was even then both passio and actio, the liturgy, which served the anamnesis of this sacrifice, was now also multiple things at one time. The worship of the people was now this sacrifice; each sacrifice in world history was related to the act of Jesus’ sacrifice. He was the real agent of the liturgy; He used the people only as mediums. The liturgy descended deep to the beginning of time. It celebrated Sunday as the day of creation; at Easter it reenacted God’s separation of light from darkness on the first day of creation and sanctified the water through the breath of the priest, as in the beginning the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the waters. It transformed the blasphemous events of Golgotha ​​into their opposite, into highest sacredness; the gruesome slaughter into the act of reverence, as if to ever again make good the deicide, but also to reveal the reality hidden in it, the glory of the acts of the Redeemer. And it looked to the future, to the eternal heavenly liturgy described in the liturgical book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, the “marriage of the Lamb,” the liturgy that ever celebrates the cosmos and to which the people draw near only by their celebration. This is why the priests wear the alb, the white robe of the men standing around the throne of God in the Book of Revelation. This is why the “Lamb of God” is invoked in the liturgy. This is where the incense has its New Testament legitimacy.

“In this realm time becomes space.” The liturgy confirms this line from Wagner’s Parsifal. In the liturgy are experienced in one place the various ages and, indeed, even the exiting from historic time and the entering of that timelessness that eternally accompanies us. But the fulcrum of this turbulent time travel is always the Cross; this is where the beams from past and future converge. Therefore it is also crucial that a large cross stands on the altar so that the priest, while he holds out his hands as Jesus did, looks like a dying man before whose eyes, in earlier times, a crucifix was held.

It is part of formation through the liturgy that individual moments of Calvary’s horror are portrayed when the priest evokes them in his gestures. For example, the moment when the veil is taken off the chalice and paten invokes the moment the Christ was robbed of his garments. Upon breaking the host we recall not only the corresponding gesture at the Last Supper, but also the destruction of the body on the cross. And during the “Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum,” when the priest slips a piece of the consecrated host into the cup and thus reincorporates flesh and blood, we witness the resurrection. These allusions perhaps explain what is meant when the Christian liturgy is called an “observance of the mysteries” (Mysterienfeier). The word mystery is always translated incorrectly in this context. It can evoke all sorts of wrong associations; secrecy is not far off, even intellectual laziness or that cunning that would like to surround irrationalities with a disastrous sublimity. For the purposes of the liturgy, however, mystery means no more than “event,” “act,” “phenomenon,” “occurrence.” An act whose meaning is only understood by the initiated: the truth that needs not be understood, but looked upon, like the Redeemer himself, who needed not respond to Pilate’s question “What is truth?” because His presence was the answer.

Here we must clarify a particular German misunderstanding. In Germany one who defends the traditional liturgy of the Church incurs one of the harshest, explicitly morally-tinged condemnations: he is an “aestheticist” who hangs onto the old form out of a dubious proclivity for glittering decoration and the compulsions of an antique collector. Such tendencies would be worthy of derision if in truth they were not an expression of superficiality masking sheer frivolity. In Germany we like to distinguish between the glistening surface and the deeper values. Preferably, deeper values ​​are not externally perceptible. What appears “beautiful” is mostly untrue and morally questionable. When the word “aestheticism” is uttered, the defender of the traditional liturgy has already lost; his arguments are exposed as symptoms of questionable character.

It must certainly therefore be devastating for the traditional liturgy that it is beautiful; beauty defined as well-formed, symmetry, absence of arbitrariness, musical rhythm, clarity, classical calm, absence of the fashionable, perfected creation of a spiritual event. The intellectual historic process that led to this widespread distrust of beauty did not emerge only yesterday. It has its roots in that German vice, philosophy, an eloquent juggling of definitions that revels in the separation – impossible in reality – of content and form. It has roots in the Protestant culture of introspection and in the playing off, habitual since the eighteenth century, of pagan beauty and associated libertinage against Christian morality, which suspects the devil behind beauty.

I will not deal further with this question, because I am speaking of more important things than the analysis of a national psychopathology. It is not about the beauty, perfection, grace and splendor of the traditional liturgy, as much as it possesses all of these. It possesses them in passing, inadvertently. For it is not the product of artistic work, artistic expression, artistic composition. The liturgy has spawned an almost immeasurable amount of art, but itself does not need art, defined as the personal creativity of a master. If we associate the concept of art with the conscious process of artistic creativity, the Mass has nothing to do with art in this sense because it is an anonymous creation, without authors, a collective work that unfolded over centuries as a living entity. It is as impersonal as a fire burning in a temple that is not allowed to go out for fear the world will fare badly. All its parts are arranged with utmost accuracy around the great theurgical act in their midst. Every gesture is designed to remind the celebrant and the faithful that what is acting and being expressed here is no individual human will, but the divine Master. And because the intention is not directed at it, because no personal pretension dominates the space, because the sole impulse of the celebrant is subjection to that which is mandated, this beauty, that elusive quarry, not even noticed by many, suddenly appears. It accompanies what is right, barely more than a sign that human self-will has been silenced for the short duration of the liturgy.

Over the past four decades another term that has played an important role in the discussion about the rite of the Church is “contemporaneity.” This word is also associated with many misunderstandings. That something – a law, a custom, the use of language, a political position – must be “contemporary” sounds so perfectly normal it really requires no justification. As beautiful and good as things may be, if they are no longer perceived as contemporary they are beyond remedy, no matter what else speaks for them.

As many moderate modifications as it may have experienced in its history, the fact that the Traditional Mass remained essentially unchanged from the first Christian millennium to the end of the second shattered all historical probability. It was not just something from yesterday, something old-fashioned or outdated, looming into the present-day, but something almost incomprehensibly ancient in the millennia of human history. This Mass was already no longer contemporary in the nineteenth century with its aesthetics of Goethe and Wagner, Neuschwanstein and the Eiffel Tower. In the elegant eighteenth century attempts were made to hide the strange antiquity of the Mass under great orchestral music as if behind an iconostasis of modern sound. The Mass comes, we know, from Late Mediterranean Antiquity, an urban culture of many religions and a colorful mix of peoples and races, with philosophically enlightened upper classes and thousands of obscure cults of slaves and ordinary people. How it was able to hold its own in feudal, agrarian northern Europe is such a mystery, merely from the socio-historical point of view, that the phenomenon borders on the improbable. Certainly the un-contemporaneity of the liturgy represented a real problem in many eras and many eras of the past could have made it a lot simpler with a “contemporary” adaptation. And indeed, there were all sorts of attempts at adaptation, though they never altered the text of the missal or the details of the ceremonial language. They were rather production variations – to put it in theatrical terms – the famous Low Mass for instance, or the introduction of songs in the national language. We could say that now and again the Church authorities lost their nerve against the forces of the respective zeitgeist with respect to the liturgical program placed in their trust to preserve. The un-contemporaneity of the liturgy, which is in equidistance at any historical era, was regarded as a burden and not as what it is: a trump.

It’s tricky with contemporaneity: when you try to grab and hold onto it, you end up holding the dead tail of a lizard in your hand. Arrested contemporaneity is necessarily always about to go out of date. The radical form of the liturgy, by contrast, cannot go out of date because it does not belong to time, but moves outside of time.

Many arguments are based on the incomprehensibility of Latin in our present time. Have we forgotten that in past centuries Latin was also “understood” by only a few? Germany became a Christian country with a Latin liturgy at a time when the Germanic, Frankish and Alemannic farmers not only spoke no Latin, but also could not read and write. Incidentally the same was true of their masters. As for the Latin of the clergy, there was certainly a germ of reality in the satire of Ulrich von Hutten about the Viri obscuri, the obscurantists with their depraved macaroni Latin. Recently, philologists have very vividly shown that the Latin of the Mass was not even the Latin spoken by the people of Rome in the fourth century AD. The vernacular of that multiethnic city was simplified Greek, Koine. The Mass was Latinized out of the specific need to render the sacrificial act in a sacred, exalted language that could compete against the high cultural level of the liturgical language of paganism.

Thus as a rhetorical linguistic work of art the Roman canon emerged in a form of rhythmic prose that is strictly separated from rhythmic poetry but that remains recognizable as an ordered spoken melody. There is nothing similar in modern languages; as a spoken work of art the canon is literally untranslatable.

Nevertheless, even the most resolute advocates of the vernacular in the liturgy cannot claim that the faithful of past centuries did not know what was happening in the Holy Mass. They could not, of course, relate what they heard word for word, but there were not only words, there were gestures and processions, there was kneeling and blessings, singing and bells, and this entirety contained a message that Catholics understood very well for two thousand years. They experienced theophany; God made himself accessible to the people, was with them, and His physical nearness in the liturgy was just as reliably experiential as back in the Holy Land. No one needs to know more – or less – about the liturgy. Those who understand every word of the ceremony but do not know this basic truth have understood nothing of the Mass.

And it is, I fear, a mistake if we think or hope that the use of the vernacular made the Mass more understandable. This does not even take into account the great problem of translation (Josef Pieper, who I mentioned above, said using everyday language in the liturgy could be decided only when useful translations existed) and everyone knows what unforeseen difficulties and substance for dispute and division this involves. The Sunday edition of the F.A.Z. (2) recently published a revealing but not surprising essay by a journalist who was born in former East Germany and raised irreligiously who described a visit to a Sunday Mass in the reformed rite. He admitted that the entire process, of which he understood every word, remained a mystery to him. That’s not surprising. The liturgy is not catechetical instruction. Celebrating it, especially in its reformed form, requires a great deal of knowledge where that form does not, in its symbolic fullness, unequivocally appeal to a basic knowledge, common to all cultures and grounded in anthropology, of the presence of the sacred, of the experience of sacred space, of the gesture of sacrifice. To me, one of the greatest treasures of Islam is its five daily prayers when the faithful prostrate themselves before God on the earth and touch their foreheads to the ground. How much theology becomes unnecessary at the sight of people praying so! The prayers of the traditional Latin and Greek, Coptic and Syro-Malankara liturgies are infinitely more varied than that of Islam, as is appropriate for initiation mysteries. Yet worship, theocentrism, reverence, submission to divine will, entering another world with other laws can also easily be read in them, even if they seem confusing and hermetic to an outsider.

The rejection of the traditional liturgy has certainly unexpectedly resulted in one particular problem for the contemporary Church. To outsiders, including many Catholics, the Catholic Church today is mainly embodied in the morality it teaches and demands of its faithful, which, manifest in prohibitions and commandments, are contrary to the beliefs of the secular world. In a church centered mainly on the immediate liturgical encounter with God, these moral demands were related not only to life choices, but were specifically conceived as preparation for full participation in the liturgy.

It was the liturgy that specified the goal of morality. The question was: what must I do to attain full communion with the Eucharistic Christ in the liturgy? What makes me only able to observe this Christ from a distance? That which is morally forbidden appeared not simply as the incarnation of evil, but as something to be avoided for the sake of a specific objective. And when the commandment that excludes us from communion was transgressed, the sacrament of confession stood ready to heal the damage and prepare us for communion. Surprisingly, it turned out that the Catholic Church of the past, which focused on the liturgy, seemed scandalously morally lax to outsiders, while to contemporaries and not only the unchurched, the present Church seems unbearably preachy, merciless and pettily puritanical.

Why so many observations about a matter that is perhaps over and done with? There is a passage by Ernst Jünger that has troubled me deeply. It is in his collection of aphorisms Über Autor und Autorschaft (On Author and Authorship): “For conservatives […] the point comes when the files are closed. Then tradition may no longer be defended. The fathers are worshiped in silence and in dreams. When the files are closed, let them rest, held in trust for future historians.” This is the question that I am not able to answer: Is the liturgy being celebrated in the photo I mentioned earlier amidst and in disregard of terror and destruction truly a testimony of victory over history, or is it an infinitely noble, poignant farewell picture? Remember, the Orthodox churches of Russia and Greece, Egypt, Syria and India hold fast to this image of the liturgy I described in full conviction. These churches are not insignificant parts of Christendom and have truly been tested in the fiery furnace; not Rahner’s “tragicomic marginal figures who failed in their humanity,” among which I gladly count myself. In the course of the ecumenism required of us, whether we can constructively recall our own abundance of traditions will depend on whether the Church is entirely subject to the laws of history, sociology, psychology and politics or whether there is something in her that defies these laws because it comes from other realms.

(1) Speech held at the invitation of the Bishop of Limburg/Lahn, His Excellency Dr. Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, February 13, 2013 at the Ash Wednesday of the Artists in the Haus am Dom in Frankfurt am Main.

(2) The “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” – the leading newspaper in Germany (SC)

Martin Mosebach, born in 1951 in Frankfurt am Main, has lived there as a freelance writer since completing his state law exams. He has received numerous awards including the 1999 Heimito von Doderer Literature Prize, the 2002 Kleist Prize, the 2007 Georg Büchner Prize and the 2013 Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

(Readers may recall the case of the “Bishop of Bling” who had been forced to resign in March 2014 after an unprecedented campaign against him both in the German-language media and in the German Church. A glance at the German Wikipedia article on Bishop Tebartz-van Elst gives an idea of the real sources of the conflict. Even though the following essay of May 2014 is very specific to the German situation, recent events have made it more relevant than ever. First, even without a diocese, Bishop Tebartz-van Elst is still hounded by the German press and Church – he recently had to cancel a minor speaking engagement because of their hostility. Second, cost overruns far in excess of the Limburg situation have recently been reported for building projects in other German dioceses – with no reaction from either the press or the Vatican. Third, since the publication of Mr. Mosebach’s essay a pattern has emerged of Pope Francis working hand in hand with local hierarchies to force out conservative prelates – one thinks of further examples in Paraguay, France and Italy. Finally, we have here a case study of the close collaboration between the media and the progressive Catholic establishment – a relationship that of course has blossomed in unheard-of luxuriance under Pope Francis.

I understand that Mr Mosebach gave a magnificent reading of his essay – my translation can hardly do justice to it. Let me add just a couple of notes. The diocese of Limburg includes the city of Frankfurt (the home of Martin Mosebach) and has the reputation of being one of the most liberal in Germany. Mr Mosebach names neither the newspaper nor the author of the article but a German language internet search will speedily reveal both. “Liberal”, as is usually the case outside the United States, does not mean “progressive” or left-wing, but rather “classic” (economic) liberalism, tending even in the direction of libertarianism. (SC))

Bishop Tebartz-van Elst and the Press

By Martin Mosebach

Is the case of the Bishop of Limburg, Franz Peter Tebartz-van Elst, really already closed? Just look at the plain facts: the German Bishops’ conference had established a commission of investigation to determine how the explosion of costs occurred in the construction of the Bishop’s residence that had been commissioned by the Limburg cathedral chapter. It gave the bishop a great deal of the responsibility for the misguided planning. Another share was borne by the cathedral chapter, which had failed in its duty of supervision. The vicar general was also not spared blame.

What only became clear later was that the bishop had already offered his resignation to the pope in October 2013, which the Holy Father, after reading the report of the commission, then accepted. It is worth keeping this nuance in mind. The bishop was not reprimanded and no ecclesiastical penalty was imposed on him. That was obviously because, after evaluating the circumstances, that had been found inappropriate. The resignation was accepted because the bishop “in the situation that has arisen can longer exercise his office of bishop.” This was the report’s sober and completely accurate conclusion in the face of the wave of contempt and hate that poured upon the bishop from clerical circles and from the “professional Catholics” of the lay organizations. The “Tebartz case” had dominated the headlines of most newspapers in those months when Syria was ablaze, the European currency was threatening to collapse and Christians were undergoing persecution in so many lands. Priests of the diocese of Limburg had refused to pray for the bishop in the canon of the mass, many people (how many really?) are supposed to have left the Church and the bishop was threatened with physical violence. In a word, the odium plebis of which canon law speaks as a reason for the impossibility of exercising the office of bishop, existed without any doubt and would also have existed if the investigation of the bishop had acquitted him of any responsibility.

We have to stress this fact. It was known both to the pope and to the Congregation for Bishops in Rome when they passed over the cathedral chapter when appointing the administrator during the vacancy and named an administrator without the participation of the chapter. Whether a cathedral chapter that had so emphatically fostered the emergence of this odium plebis even before clarification of the factsshould participate at all in the appointment of a new bishop is regrettably only a theoretical question for canon lawyers.

I would like to direct my attention not to the guilt, the negligence, the clumsiness or the idiosyncrasies of the unfortunate Bishop – there is something here of all of this- but to the way in which the press had seized upon this case before the facts had been clearly determined. And I intend not to analyze the whole mass of articles that appeared on this topic but just a single one. It can, however, claim to be unique and to have founded a new era in the newspaper in which it was permitted to appear. That paper is a “newspaper of record,” in the language of the news business, which still enjoys among the majority of its readers the reputation of trustworthiness – to the extent that the press, in its essence, can ever be trustworthy. (Karl Krauss, as is well known, disputed that fundamentally, adducing arguments that are hard to refute.)

The newspaper of which I speak has a reputation of being “liberal-conservative.” However, the paper takes a broad view of these concepts; it places great value on the fact that in its pages voices are able to speak that depart from the main line of the editorial staff. At least that’s how it was for a long time; those who didn’t like this newspaper often mocked it just for this effort to achieve balance. They accused it of being “gray” but it was a honorable gray that those readers appreciated who didn’t want to be entertained by a newspaper but to be instructed by it in order to form their own opinion. It did happen now and then that this newspaper engaged in real battles, that it tried to throw its political presence onto the scales – but this was rare.

All the more astonishing, then, was a series of articles that dealt with the question of whether the participation of the German bishops in the state pregnancy consultation process might make abortions possible. There were two Catholic authors on the editorial staff who fought passionately against the German Catholic Church remaining in this system of consultation – and with success. And after the publication of a major essay of Robert Spaemann against consequentialist ethics the discussion of this question was over. The defeated forces in the German episcopacy remained quiet – but were determined never to suffer such a thing ever again.

First, the malicious concept of “culture pages Catholicism” was launched to deny spiritual seriousness to the writing laymen who had been otherwise so eagerly courted. But this was just the initial skirmish. Soon, behind the scenes, matters were arranged so that one could no longer speak of “culture pages Catholicism” which dissented from the ruling milieu of the official sphere of the Church. The tone of the newspaper when the subject of the Church came up had clearly changed; not just in the arguments but also in the mood.

Now, it is indeed the case that the interest in ecclesiastical questions among the “liberal,” economically oriented bourgeoisie (which still represented a certain percentage of the subscribers to this newspaper) had become most attenuated. That the articles became more and more polemic, that they offered more and more scope to resentments against the traditional Church – was probably registered by the greater part of the reading public only with a shrug of the shoulders.

That was going to change in the case of the Limburg bishop. Gradually it became clear to a greater circle of readers, which in any case clearly exceeded the percentage of interested Catholics, that this newspaper had resolutely bid farewell to a reporting style concerned with objectivity. It had made the financial carelessness of this cleric into a grand affair, which in the language and persecuting zeal followed the examples of the witch hunts against Minister Guttenberg and his fake doctoral degree or President Wulff and his Wuestenrot cottage.

Finally, a year ago, on June 24, 2013, appeared an article on page 3 of this publication; in a very prominent place and covering the whole page. This essay was, up till then, without precedent. I would like to dedicate myself to it in detail – reluctantly, so painfully embarrassing is this text.

Let me sum up one more time: this article was written before the report of the commission was published. There was a strong opposition movement in the diocese against the bishop. For those not involved, however, its accusations were not really understandable. The bishop was supposed to have spread among his subordinates an atmosphere of paralyzing fear. He was supposed to be “cold.” His residence which, nota bene, would also be that of his successors (it’s not a private home) would be possibly three times as expensive as had first been planned – instead of 3 million euro, the cost was now estimated at 9 million. He was supposed to be “resistant to advice” – ominous words that everyone could so interpret the way he wanted. For example, it could mean that the bishop was not ready without further ado to let himself be manipulated by his own organization. For those knowledgeable of the situation many things speak for this supposition. Tebartz-van Elst had dared to cancel a darling project of his predecessor: the establishment of parishes led no longer by priests, but by laymen, which contradicted canon law. And Tebartz-van Elst did this against the emphatic “advice” of exactly these laymen and of priests intoxicated by a new ecclesiology.

But you would find in our essay not a single line on this very serious conflict, which affected the future of the entire Church – even though this was the foundation of the dissension between the bishop and his synod council, his priest councils and the other post conciliar, abundantly inserted Soviets. As we shall see, this essay involved nothing as pedestrian as “information” – maybe “literature” is the more appropriate term. For our article, whose beginning is so “atmospherically dense” (to use the language of a book review), has as its objective nothing less than to condemn a man to civil death before the pronunciation of the verdict.

“Limburg, June 23. It is cold on Easter Sunday – so cold that just the view of of the windswept square before the Limburg cathedral chills the few bystanders who have wandered here in the evening twilight. The show that will be offered to them a few minutes before 5 o’clock is also not conducive to warming their hearts. As if led by a ghostly hand, a phalanx of clergymen and ministers strides silently around the cathedral, and disappears shortly afterwards into the building. “Grand Entrance” – the man who formed the end of the procession had summarily commanded this to his aghast cathedral chapter. In Rome there’s disarmament, in Limburg rearmament. The cold pierces to the very marrow.”

We can see that a mighty shaman is at work here, whose heart’s desire can even chill the cosmos. We hear that journalists shouldn’t describe complex incidents from the perspective of an insider in order that the clueless reader can follow him. Our author therefore is making efforts to describe the Easter liturgy, of which he is the witness, from the perspective of religious ignorance, which he probably correctly imputes to the majority of his readers. And so he hopes to get a laugh, when he presents the Catholic liturgy as a gloomy, dismal spectacle. But here perhaps is a case of overshooting the mark – for a “Grand Entrance” for pontifical vespers on Easter Sunday is a matter of course that doesn’t need to be “summarily ordered.” By the way, the same is true for every parish church on this greatest feast day of the Church. Incidentally, every Sunday High Mass has to begin with this same “Grand Entrance” which represents the royal entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, that paradoxical beginning of the Passion, which at the same time points beyond the suffering and prefigures the second coming.

Is a simple journalist expected to know that? Not every one, but certainly this one, since he had studied theology, taken final vows and had been ordained deacon, before he gave up the clerical state. Given his formation, he would have been eminently qualified to explain the treasure of the rituals of the Church to an unknowing public – even though his knowledge of the languages of the Bible is so shaky that he didn’t know what a phalanx is. But it would have been a shame to drop the comical, combative seasoning in describing a procession that was led not by a ghostly hand but by a crucifix.

“Five years after (Tebartz) taking office no unity can be sensed. The tensions, on the other hand, are all the greater.”

Tensions – an ominous word – now how could they have arisen? What are the two poles between which tensions exist in the diocese of Limburg? The reader learns nothing about this. But there would have been much to report from the recent history of the diocese in which, in the last five decades, anti-Roman sentiments have been nurtured. Of Bishop Kamphaus, the predecessor of Tebartz, we only read, trivializing, that he “stood up to Pope John Paul II longer than all the other German bishops in the battle against leaving the legal pregnancy consultations and he yet only had to offer his resignation at the age of 75.” That is incomplete. After Kamphaus, as expected, had not followed up on his threat to resign, the pope had punished the bishop by relieving him of responsibility for the matter of the consultations. In such a diocese the transition to a shepherd loyal to Rome really cannot happen without tensions – but only informed readers could suspect that. Further down in the text we read:

“The shepherd must have the smell of the sheep, the new pope Francis had to hammer home in Rome to the bishops and cardinals at the beginning of Holy Week. In Limburg it’s rather the scent of finest leather. A black limousine polished to a mirror finish stands before the entrance to the episcopal residence; a tanned man in his middle 50s with a lot of gel in his hair doesn’t depart from the side of the bishop. In the cathedral, the clouds from not one but two censers literally take away the breath of the believers.”

Isn’t it amazing that our author obviously believes he can with class envy arouse emotions against the bishop among his solidly bourgeois readers? It is, once again, atmosphere, only atmosphere – but it becomes ever more poisonous. The rather embarrassing words of the pope may express the experiences of South America, where aftershave is a little inappropriate for a pastor serving in the slums of São Paulo. But the real problem of a diocese like Limburg (well known, of course, to our author) is that it is a church of the wealthy which long ago lost all connection to its own poor – not those in exotic regions. Now the Church and the faithful of the Rhine-Main region do smell of the finest leather – to take up again the specific comparison of our author. The limousine of the bishop is rented, like every other Episcopal vehicle in Germany, at a favorable rate, which might have been known to the author. But “polished to a mirror finish“: does that not awaken associations of luxury, power and control?

One sees the slave who not only washes the auto but, down on his knees, polishes it. But it is no slave but a tanned man in his mid-50s with a lot of gel in his hair. And he not only polishes the bishop’s auto but he never departs from his side. And never from the side of the author as well, who knows what a valuable trump the figure of this man can be in this article devoid of substance. He lets him wander through the article four times until the thick smoke of suspicion, insinuation and innocent hints (The backstairs gossip always closes her defamatory comments with “I didn’t say anything!”) has solidified to calumny. Calumny, which, to be sure, can’t be contested: you can hear our author mockingly remark: “You don’t after all have to concern yourself with it.” This expression fits perfectly in his style. To continue:

Haven’t nasty references to bodily features – in this case to the very large eyes of the bishop – long been taboo in political articles? Comments on the appearance of the chancellor (Merkel), for example, would never have made it past the crosschecking editor. But in that case, of course, one would have had to deal with real power, while open season had been declared for a long time on the bishop. Even though there was insufficient damning material available, the holes in the argumentation could be smeared over with a lot of gel. What stays or rather sticks in the reader’s mind is this: obviously, unheard of things must exist against the bishop – yet they remain unidentifiable.

The construction site on the cathedral mount “was transformed into a forest of plans”, once again an unhappy image but not a concrete accusation that could provide substance for the conclusion that: “expectation turned into disappointment; strangeness changed swiftly into mutual distrust.” The observation is, of course, very damaging that the bishop has a “need for soulless pomp” in the liturgy as is the suggestion that the faithful had asthma attacks because of the quantity of incense. All clichés from anti-Catholic polemics since Luther’s time – how comforting it is that our author can so soulfully write against them. Joking aside, the complaint about soullessness is always most suspicious – it’s almost always evidence of sentimentality and mendacity.

And, apropos mendacity, Max Scheler’s observation is unforgettable: “whoever is mendacious doesn’t need to lie anymore.” Yes, our author tells the truth when he complains that the bishop had acquired, (scandalously – the expression is at the tip of his tongue) – “a new Madonna” for the Cathedral. There may be churches in which there are so many images of the Madonna that another one is not exactly necessary, but the Limburg Cathedral was distinguished from all of other cathedrals in Germany in that there was not a single image of the Madonna for the faithful to venerate. The predecessor of Bishop Tebartz had found Marian presence to be superfluous. That Tebartz had now, after decades, created in his church once again a home for the Beata, is something that he could have made emphatically public. He didn’t do so, presumably out of tact towards his predecessor. But such discretion remains unrewarded in the realm of the media, which are entirely occupied with shouting out loud or gossiping to death.

As a laicized monk and deacon, our author should have been able to convey understanding for the fact that the bishop took out of the museum liturgical objects and gave back to them their original function – that which their pious donors had intended. Sacred objects really have no business in a museum; they belong in the sacristy where they of course can also be viewed when they’re not being used. But our author knows already how to give the ugly monkey a little more sugar: “(Tebartz took) from the stores of the diocesan museum a platter so big it’s fit for a turkey, as the bowl for the lavabo.”

The bishop is supposed to be no longer welcome in the parishes “because on his pilgrimages to the Holy Land he preferred the presence of his chauffeur to that of his clergy, and enjoyed himself in the first rows of seats while the flock of pilgrims had to remain in the back by themselves.” How do you luxuriate in an airplane seat with a plastic tray of shrink-wrapped rolls before you? How do you have an exchange of views with the pilgrim group in an airplane? Our author twists the facts like the hysterical women that kill their husbands in the popular plays of Yazmina Reza. And so on and so forth. And when the meager facts have been totally used up, that tanned fellow sneaks by like the white elephant in the Rilke poem. “I haven’t said a thing”, that’s the motto of the prying concierge that could most appropriately serve as the title of our author’s article.

What stones must have rolled away from the heart of our author when the report of the commission indeed found partial responsibility of the bishop for the disorder in his diocese and the pope accepted the resignation request! Where would he have stood if the investigation had found no questionable conduct? Indeed, for a while that appeared to be the case. But we shouldn’t be worried about a journalist like our author. Such people basically don’t take seriously what they’ve written – their contempt for man begins basically with themselves and the superficiality of their actions.

An evil press – evil times, evil customs – so could one lament. But it is not that simple. When I protested about this article to the editor of the newspaper he answered with superior irony that, as a Protestant, he observed “with interest developments in German Catholicism”. At first I was irritated at the man’s undisguised gloating – but then I recognized that he was right. No, this article – and the many other things that have been written by our author and many other Catholic journalists in other respectable newspapers – is only in part a problem of the press and its anti-clerical conventions. It is above all a problem of the Catholic Church in Germany and her undiminished readiness, even when exhausted and weak, to tear herself apart and engage in internecine civil war right up to annihilation.

Our author is after all less a representative of a newspaper for the intelligentsia, than an unofficial spokesman of powerful forces in the German Church, which provide him with information and designate which dignitaries are to be knocked off. After all, before Bishop Tebartz, it was no less than Pope Benedict, that “god-awful theologian,” in the words of our author. The forty years that have passed since the Second Vatican Council have transformed the German church into a snake pit, inhabited by weak, fearful but extremely vicious snakes. The disastrous system of the Episcopal conference and its almighty bureaucracy ensure that no strong personality has a chance anymore to become a bishop. Even those apparently not totally feeble are held on the shortest of leashes. After the “case” of Bishop Tebartz, it may be interesting to see who of the German prelates succeeds to the Limburg diocese. I will refrain from speculating about the necessary character qualifications. I am not qualified to make prognoses for the future.

At the present time I don’t see how the German Church can do justice to its real reason for existence: to reveal to men the supernatural presence of God, give access to the sacraments and witness to the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption. In comparison to this our concerns about a malevolent anti-clerical press are nothing more than the annoyance of a swarm of gnats. Despite our regrets about the disappearance of quality journalism we cannot forget that the Church has tasks other than coming to terms with the newspapers.

(The following is not by Martin Mosebach – SC)

NOTE:We give here the text, which Martin Mosebach presented on May 1, 2014 in Bonn. He had been invited by the Institute for Social Sciences Walberberg which dedicated its annual day dedicated to the ethics of media to the theme: “Expectations of Quality Journalism in Times of Scandal.” Also participating in this symposium in the Hotel Bristol before 250 attendees was the journalist Günter von Lojewski, formerly Intendant of the Station Free Berlin and Martin Lohmann, editor-in-chief of the private tv station K-TV. The names of the newspaper and of the editor were deliberately not mentioned by Mr. Mosebach but can be easily discovered.

Martin Mosebach is known on these shores as a Catholic apologist and as the author of the Heresy of Formlessness. But in his own country he is above all a novelist. There has now appeared What was Before – to my knowledge the first translation of one of his novels (Was davor Geschah) into English. (Kari Driscoll, translator; Seagull Books, 2014). You can get it at Amazon.

The author Martin Mosebach is one of the best-known conservative Catholic intellectuals in the German-speaking world. He emphatically greeted the restoration in 2007 by Pope Benedict XVI of the old rite of the mass. The author, who currently is living in Rome under a grant, reveals in an interview with the Catholic News Agency (“KNA”) what he thinks about the new style of Pope Francis.

KNA: Mr. Mosebach, Pope Francis appears to be striving for changes in the structure and in the pastoral practice of the Church. What does a conservative Catholic think in the midst of so much euphoric rhetoric?

Mosebach: Up till now no one can say what Francis really wants precisely. Public opinion tries to insinuate that he has intentions that fit in with the spirit of our age. It is possible that he wants to accomplish great reforms. It is also possible that he is being misjudged, and that he not so very interested in change. The people cheer him, but I do not know if they know whom they are exactly cheering. As approachable and warm as Francis appears he is also just as reserved. He doesn’t give anyone a peek into his hand of cards.

KNA: Francis himself has stoked these expectations.

Mosebach: …and that even among people who have nothing to do with the Catholic Church. They assess him as a new president who is proposing a new legislative package. Traditionally a pope does not act in this way. His office consists in continuity not in change. He does not have the mission to reinvent the church. From the very first second, however, Francis has chosen a symbolic language that serves the media public and is supposed to convey this: I will do everything differently. That was not very loyal towards his predecessor. From his “buona sera” instead of the priestly greeting “Praised be Jesus Christ,” to his rejection of papal garments to his move into the Vatican guesthouse. My feeling is that these externals have acquired an inappropriate importance.

KNA: You lack sympathy for the papal humility?

Mosebach: Ultimately that to me is not humility but a dimming down to a style of life coinciding with today’s secular power. Today billionaires wear T-shirts and sit in comfortable sofas instead of on hard Baroque furniture. Heavy brocaded vestments that represent the glory of the Christ who is to come again are very uncomfortable. The Bergoglio style should not be confused with asceticism. And even if Francis were an ascetic, I would not like at all to hear about it from the mass media. Asceticism has value above all when it is hidden.

KNA: Many conservative Catholics fear an attack on the doctrines of the church under Francis. The initiatives of the synod on the family in October for a new method of dealing with remarried divorced people and homosexuals were after all far reaching.

Mosebach: If the intense management of the synod originated with Francis, he at least received pushback. The interim report could not be successfully pushed through. The tempo disturbed me in all this. The church was always slow but that was good. Endless discussions reflected the spiritual development until at some point the papal decision was taken. In the end always that which had been proven was successful. That is the meaning of the image of the pilgrim Church throughout history. This path should be, as much as possible, without losses in substance. But as I have said, up to now it is totally unclear what Francis really thinks. We only know that he places great value on a merciful Church that stands on the side of the poor – which from the very beginning has been always natural for the Church.

KNA: Do you hope for anything then from Francis?

Mosebach: I hope from every pope that he strengthens Catholics in their faith and that, through him, the Church gains spiritual force so that she can maintain her faith against the spirit of the times. But this takes time. Scenes of cheering around the popemobile are not a standard for that. Only in a couple of years will one be able to see if the seminaries and the religious orders once again have more candidates and conversions increase; if there is therefore anything to Francis beyond that he’s nice and is able to communicate with the masses.

KNA: At the end of November, for example, the pope appealed before the EU Parliament in Strasbourg to Europe’s Christian identity. Did that impress you?

Mosebach: On the one hand it was good to remind secular politicians of that which they absolutely do not want to hear. Namely that everything which calls itself European is attributable to Christianity. Even the anti-Christian tendencies since the Enlightenment could never sever themselves from the debate with religion.

KNA: But on the other hand?

Mosebach: Such appearances are for me in the end just pious utterances, which go in one ear of the politicians and out the other. Really, these papal appeals don’t interest me at all. I would rather have a pope who never gives any speeches. I would like a pope who imposes his hands on the people, who blesses them, who absolves them from their sins and says the mass for them. A priest-pope, not a politician-pope.

KNA: That sounds to be sure a little unworldly and would deprive the Catholic Church of much of her effectiveness. What do you have against charismatic leaders on the papal throne?

Mosebach: I have nothing against charisma in the Church – quite the opposite. But from the beginning, the Church separated institution and charisma. It wasn’t Paul the charismatic theologian who became the first pope but Peter the fisherman, a priestly, blessing figure. St. Francis also did not become pope even though he filled the people of his time with the greatest enthusiasm. He didn’t even want to be a priest. The Church breathes with two lungs – with the institutional offices culminating in the papacy and with the enthusiasm for the faith of her charismatic individuals. Both should be kept separated. I consider it to be an error to canonize popes. They should be above all the guardians of continuity and of the sacraments.

KNA: Which, since the new regulation of Benedict XVI can be celebrated once more according to the old missal. At that time you were among its greatest supporters. Pope Francis appears to have less interest in this.

Mosebach: I think that he probably has no great interest either in the old or in the new rite – or in liturgy at all – which I myself take to be the heart of the Church. In this he is completely a Jesuit. In 2007, however, as the first archbishop of the world, he put a church at the service of the celebration of the old rite of mass in Buenos Aires. Obviously he has nothing against it. The celebration of the old rite had expanded worldwide under Benedict. In almost every larger German city you can celebrate it. Its presence is even stronger in France and strongest of all in the USA. With this action Benedict XVI reacted to a widespread need. For me that was his greatest achievement as pope.

KNA: But the discussions with the FSSPX are still stalled. How do you judge the prospects for an agreement between the Church and the traditionalists?

Mosebach: I have no prognosis in this regard but such an agreement would be very desirable. In the first place, the crucial thing is that the discussions are continuing at all – and they are. After Benedict’s resignation many said that the door has been finally slammed shut for the Fraternity of Pius X. But Francis has had basically even fewer problems with them than had his predecessor because he is interested far less in detailed questions of theology.

KNA: Do you miss Benedict XVI?

Mosebach: I regretted his resignation very much. He felt that he could no longer physically meet the demands of the office and felt that his remaining time in office was too short to allow it to be followed by a long phase of agony like that of John Paul II. One has to accept that. The shape of the new institution of the “pope emeritus” is for me still insufficiently clear. I hope that a new age of popes that have resigned does not lie before us. In any case Benedict XVI was a great pope but no ruler. In contrast Francis is a ruler and an autocrat. Whether he is also a great pope still has to be seen.

A discussion paper for the conference “Is One Permitted to do That? Art and Its Boundaries,” at the Institute for Cultural Studies at Essen

I.

Does the German State have a genuine interest in forbidding blasphemy in art and in published opinion and should it enforce this prohibition with punishment? One could take the point of view that the secular state, which remains neutral toward the religions and anti-religions of its citizens, is sentenced to silence on the question of blasphemy. Blasphemy does not exist for the state—just as little as it could punish a dispute about the weather which featured insults to the sun and the moon. To be sure, it would have to pay heed to insults directed at the meteorologists so that the border with defamation and slander was not crossed.

The question, however, is whether the Federal Republic of Germany is such an ideologically neutral state. If one considers the Constitution the answer is easy; according to its preamble, the Constitution was drafted “in the awareness of the responsibility before God and men.” (1) The question of which God the fathers and mothers of this Constitution may have been thinking is also easy to answer: the God of Christendom. One would have hardly thought of another at the end of the 1940s.

This is not the place to unfold in detail, as a question of the history of ideas, how the principles of the free constitutional state, which the Federal Republic wants to be, have emerged from the commandments of Christianity – and in conflict with them – even where these principles strove to be in apparent contrast with Christianity. The very Article 1 of the Constitution, concerning the dignity of man, is unimaginable absent Christian inspiration. Precisely the inalienability of this dignity —its character indelebilis —is a Christian inheritance.

The famous Böckenförde formulation (2) that the civil-liberal state rests on premises that it can neither create nor guarantee signifies that the Federal Republic did not arise fixed and finished from the head of Zeus. Instead, it adopted philosophical and moral ideas that have arisen in other contexts. These preconditions – not created by the Federal Republic or by its lawgivers but built into the foundation of the state – basically have to remain under the special protection of the state so long as the Constitution should exist. The state has an interest that its Constitution should not be intellectually hollowed out and desiccated into empty rules but remain a living reality. Here would be found the duty of the state to protect that God, upon Whose commandments it wants to construct its moral order, from abuse, which would, over time, deprive this moral order of respect.

This is not contradicted by the fact that in the societal change of the last decades the understanding of the religious bond of the Constitution has been impaired, to put it mildly. It is of course questionable whether this invocation of God would still remain, if the new constitution (Verfassung) required by the present Constitution (Grundgesetz) would actually be created. (3) The question is however hypothetical: for a long time there will be no new constitution. All substantial political forces agree on this.

II.

However, even for the strictly ideologically neutral state the need can arise of a fight against blasphemy where it endangers the societal order. This can happen if a large enough group of believers feels so hurt in their religious convictions by blasphemy that their revolt against it becomes a public problem. This question affects the foundation of every state: the monopoly of power of the state. This monopoly is based on the relationship between protection and obedience: the citizen gives up to the state the violent pursuit of his own honor and rights. He is obedient to the prohibition of violence and in return receives the protection of the state. When a significantly large group of people no longer view their religious persuasion as protected by the state, this relationship becomes endangered.

For a long time, this appeared to be only a theoretical question. The Christians of Germany in their overwhelming majority have lost interest in religious problems. What we love to call tolerance is for the most part nothing but plain indifference. The depiction of the Christian religion in school and in the media especially emphasizes a portrayal of Christianity as a violent ideology and a threat to peace. Baudelaire’s saying that Voltaire is the “prédicateur des concierges”, the preacher for the janitors, holds true for those intellectual environments of the Federal Republic, in which the name Voltaire has never been heard. Today public opinion is that Christians should plainly be obligated to put up with invective against their beliefs without complaint. Atheists with spotty knowledge of the Bible demand that in the face of blasphemy, Christians “turn the other cheek” in accord with the command of their master.

Moreover, there is no protest even from the Christian side. Even bishops, embarrassed, look away, when there is talk of blasphemy. They do not want to notice it, so that they do not have to take up a position.

Yet ever since a strong Muslim minority has arisen in Germany it’s become a hot topic again. Unexpectedly, the advocates of integration in the German parties find themselves confronted by people who don’t understand any joking when it comes to blasphemy. They view in the demand for tolerance above all the demand that the non-Muslims of Germany respect Islamic beliefs and treat them with respect. This they demand even from those who do not share these beliefs. In England the maintenance of the public order required a prohibition of Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ due to mass demonstrations of Muslims against the defamation of the Prophet Isa. In Germany too, the penal proscription of blasphemy might gain importance again against the background of the growth of Islam in Germany.

III.

Is the threat of censorship and punishment in the case of blasphemy a menace to art? In contrast to other European nations, the Federal Republic wanted to anchor in its constitution a guarantee of “Freedom of Art” in addition to the guaranties of freedom of opinion and press. This guarantee appears dubious to many jurists today because this freedom is really sufficiently secured through freedom of opinion and press and because laying claim to this freedom before a court of law always requires the test of whether the case at issue is really about a work of art. This is a question which a court of law can no longer answer at this point in our intellectual history. Permit me to discuss this question not as a matter of law but from the standpoint of the artist. Contrary to the demand for unrestricted freedom, which artists like to assert, in the history of art it has been rather the limitation of this freedom that has been most conducive to development of art. Not being allowed to express everything and being surrounded by rigid rules has had a most stimulating effect on the imagination of artists and has inspired them to the boldest solutions. The saying is famous that “the censor refines the style. ” Then there is the maxim of that expert on censorship Karl Kraus, “A satire which the censor understands should be prohibited.”

Today, blasphemy is completely without risk if it isn’t directed against the prophet Mohammed. The attempts to outdo oneself in blasphemy miss the mark (the secret hope always remains perceptible that despite all experience a scandal or a career-enhancing prohibition will occur). Vulgarity acquires a distinctly stale after-taste, because it struts before the public in a repulsive way its snobbery and demands for toleration. It is reported that Jacques Rousseau found himself one day in the blasphemous company of mocking libertines. He silenced these gentlemen with the following words: “If it is already base to remain silent when evil is spoken about absent friends, how much worse is it to be silent, when the same happens to God, who is present.” Here is manifested that seriousness appropriate to the topic of blasphemy. Blasphemy as a casual attitude or a calculated game is cheap and cowardly; its artistic contribution remains correspondingly small. It is truly hopeless in the present age to appeal to the taste of artists who lust for blasphemy: to appeal to the instinctive aversion of harming the defenseless, of preaching to the choir while emitting howls of victory, of putting on a show before a dull and bored milieu, as if one were risking being burnt at the stake by the inquisition. In this context, I do not want to hide the fact that I am unable to feel outrage when Muslims who have been insulted in their belief give blasphemous artists (if we want to call them that) a powerful scare. I welcome it when there are men in the world like Jean-Jacques Rousseau for whom God is present. It will foster the social climate when blasphemy becomes dangerous again.

IV.

The claim of the artist to his freedom is absolute and does not tolerate the slightest restriction. But this claim is not directed against the state or society but against the artist himself. What he must fight is the divide in his own head: the readiness to serve expectations of society, to dress up his thoughts in a fashionable way, to want to please, to be at accord with popular tendencies and not to stray from the consensus omnium. He must write what the angels or devils, the muses or demons, his unconscious and his dreams whisper in his ear. For him freedom is not a right or bundle of rights for the artist. Freedom is an attribute of his own person which he has obtained through a life of self-examination. This freedom can without doubt conflict with the views of society. It can happen that the artist has to pay a high price for his freedom.

I am convinced that the truly free artist pays this price with pleasure. For him, it is self-evident: societal order and personal freedom cannot always be harmonized. The law cannot regulate every aspect of life. There are collisions which are the result of irresolvable conflicts. It is the pride and honor of the artist that he does not lament the collision with the legal order where it necessarily results from his artwork and refuses to scream for the courts. The artist who feels the calling to violate societal convention, the beliefs of those for whom God is present, or the law, is obligated—of this I am convinced—to follow this calling. He will gladly pay the price that must be incurred even if it puts his life at danger. The risks which he embraces in his breach of convention will at the same time spare him from carelessness in dealing with it. He will ask himself whether this blasphemous passage or that blasphemous element in his work is really necessary. Is it an irreplaceable part of my work or just mere squiggles, whim or naughtiness? Should I assume this risk if I want to continue to look at myself in the mirror?

And these questions will be of advantage to his work of art. And the serious believers will not withhold their respect, however reluctantly, from a work that arose in this way.

Afterword for my Benevolent Critics

The above text does not really belong in a collection of essays because it was not conceived as a perfected argument but as the basis for a discussion in a scholarly seminar. This explains the conciseness of the theses which did not want to take into consideration all imaginable points of view of a topic that is limitless in scope. It was perhaps careless to turn over such a text which was not a newspaper article to a newspaper for publication. The newspaper provided a totally different audience—one not initiated into the context of the conference. The strong and mostly irate response which this small piece attracted requires that I explain it one more time, in order to let the reader of this book decide for himself whether the alarmed and outraged tone of most reactions was in keeping with the facts.

Outrage is the keyword: it was above all my remark in the third section in which I say “I am unable to feel outraged when Muslims who are insulted in their belief give blasphemous artists a powerful scare.” In the view of many commentators that was supposed to mean that I welcomed stoning and flogging in Muslim countries and murderous assassinations from Muslims in Europe. I must say that the text concerned itself exclusively with the state of affairs in Germany. Insofar as it argued from a legal standpoint, the point of this essay was the maintenance and strengthening of the monopoly of power of the state which is thwarted precisely by the acts of vengeance of raving fanatics. I am convinced that even the very modest sanctions of the German blasphemy law were conducive towards appeasing the anger of the offended because they showed that the German state disapproves of attacks on their religion. The “powerful scare” of which I spoke, wasn’t really meant as a euphemism for a suicide bomber but was meant to signify that sudden realization of having greatly offended a strong and self-conscious group for whom religion is not private opinion, but objective reality. A society is a work of art that is not just regulated by laws — tact is above all also a political virtue. He who condones contempt will reap wrath and damage the peaceful coexistence of all. Here Machiavelli’s maxim is apropos “Where good morals end, laws have to begin.” What has amazed me is the refusal of the German cultural commentators to grant the author, who is not and does not want to be a judge or a lawgiver, the old privilege of feeling understanding for the “Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre” and the figures like Michael Kohlhaas. (4) And for the terrorist Kohlhaas what was at stake were a few horses and not the creator of the world. The central question of what blasphemy actually is was wisely excluded from the conference in Essen. It holds special problems for Christians where in the center of Christ’s divine message stands the unsurpassable blasphemy of the crucifixion of the Son of God and his doubting of the sense of this death. In Judaism and Islam this matter is perhaps somewhat easier, although even here the word of Gómez Dávila may be added “Most insults of God are only insults of the sexton.” In any case the debate has shown one thing: the strengthening of the German civil religion and its doctrines. To trespass on these is the true current form of blasphemy.

The German Constitution ratified in 1949 for West Germany – Trans.

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde is a German judge and legal philosopher – Trans.

The reference is to the presently existing German constitution (the Grundgesetz) originally intended to be temporary and to be replaced by a constitution (Verfassung) for reunited Germany. In fact this was not done after 1989 but the territories that were a part of the former German Democratic Republic acceded to the Grundgesetz. – Trans.

Verbrecher aus Verlorener Ehre (Schiller) and Michael Kohlhaas (Kleist) are examples in German literature of individuals leading a violent and solitary struggle against perceived violations of their rights – Trans.

I saw the Lourdes Madonna for the first time in the house of a winemaker of the Rheingau when I was a small boy. While my parents tasted wine below in the kitchen, the daughter of the house, who was my age, showed me the rooms in the upper story. The bedroom of her parents lay there in solemn, cool stiffness. The feather-beds were amply stuffed and hard as if they were filled with cement. The pillows had a sharp crack in the middle, which divided them into two stiff huge ears. There she stood on the dresser opposite the bed like an ice princess amid the austerity of these surroundings. Nevertheless, she was oddly vivacious with her small, delicately made-up, pretty face. My mother laughed ironically as I told her about the statue which seemed so beautiful to me: she said she was a “dresser saint.”

I soon saw, however, the next Madonna of Lourdes in another location. She was somewhat bigger than the one in the rural bedroom. Then I saw another which was very small—scarcely larger than a chess piece. However, she always had the same inclination of the head and the same flowing folds of the white garment, which was neither a dress nor an ancient tunic. It certainly was not something which one could have taken off at all, but had grown together with the body. I learned that each individual Madonna of Lourdes that I encountered was an emissary of a great Marian nation that had settled all over the world. Her body had singular proportions: the legs had to be exceedingly long as if sketched by William Blake or Füssli; the upper body was flat and no feminine swelling could be seen. The face was childlike, with a polished, noble forehead and Raphaelesque symmetry—I suppose a little bit too symmetrical, because everyone knows that even the most beautiful faces are never that symmetrical. The blue sash waved lightly and the folds of the garment were pressed against the body as if by a current of air. These features gave her figure the quality of motion, with the result that she seemed to float towards the observer. Even though one indeed saw feet in little slippers under the hem of her skirt, the statue really resembled those Japanese ladies in waiting, who conceal their feet and walk on the hems of their kimonos. Even though all the statues which I saw were painted with thick oil colors like a carousel horse, it was obvious what material was used to make them: plaster. Very often they were a little bit chipped—and thus the white, dry and grainy plaster would peek out from underneath the paint.

In the ancient churches of France, which had been pillaged during the Revolution and, more often poorly than properly, restored in the 19th century, a small plaster nation could always be found placed against the walls and intended to replace the smashed gothic statues. There was St. Louis, the Curé of Ars, the Maid of Orléans, and of course the Madonna of Lourdes. Here she had company into which she could fit. But in the German Baroque churches with their preserved, splendid decorations or in the modern cement churches she was an alien. She was generally installed with a little embarrassment in a small side chapel near the entrance. The people, however, didn’t seem to notice the embarrassment—usually too many candles burned before her. Plaster was not the only material used. There was also a clay Lady of Lourdes and a glass one used as a container for water from Lourdes. In this case, the stopper was shaped into a crown.

In the hallways of monasteries half-wilted Usambara violets and a grateful cactus bloomed at her feet. Yet her real home was an artificial grotto, related to the Baroque sea-shell grotto of princely palaces. For Our Lady of Lourdes had appeared to the little shepherdess Bernadette like an ancient spring nymph in a grotto. This now has been re-erected out of pumice-stone in many locations — landscape architecture fit for an electric railway. Everywhere there were grottoes of Lourdes, not only in the Vatican next to Renaissance Palazzetti, but also in the center of wild and violent metropolises: in Cairo and New York; in Seoul and Bogotà. Usually they could be found in churchyards where the incessant honking of the stream of traffic sounded somewhat softer: a natural collage before skyscraper walls. And before these caves there always stood a few people even when the church was closed. Red carnations in cellophane bags were attached to the fence which surrounded the grotto, and candles also burned here as the people gazed into the darkness of the hollow where, high above, the white-varnished statue stood like a Catholic Queen Louise of Prussia. 1) The big, blue mantle of the classical image of Mary had shrunk to the light-blue sash. The sash was like that blue ribbon which adorned the white diapers of baby girls before the American pink ribbon replaced it. Why I asked myself, hadn’t Our Lady of Lourdes already appeared a few hundred years earlier to the greatest of all religious painters, Fra Angelico the Florentine? What would Fra Angelico have been able to make from this white flowing, blue-girded dress—can one not see it before his eyes? However, she came later, really already in our era, because her mission here was different. In any case she apparently did not intend to become a work of art.

The ironic laughter of my mother back then had told me: in our milieu, among educated, art-loving, scholarly people, the Lady of Lourdes was not taken seriously. It was kitsch. Kitsch has been a beloved word, one that is nothing short of necessary in aesthetic judgments. It is not a very old word since it first appeared around 1860—didn’t kitsch exist before then? Was there nothing in the 18th century poorly imitated, tasteless, soullessly epigonous, dishonest or untruthful? Perhaps all those things existed, but there was no kitsch. The idea of kitsch presupposes the final end of the assurance of taste in handiwork, that is to say an inherited instinct of taste, that is able to divine from a material, familiar from time immemorial, the laws of correct proportion that reside therein. Industrial production, no longer bound to any laws of the material, has become supreme. However, man himself is slower than the technological development. In his dreams and his standards he remains, really even to this day, rooted in the preindustrial millennia stretching back into gray antiquity. He lulls himself with seductive ideas: is the departure from the traditional conception of beauty, from the proportions that grew organically from the material, really so final after all? Can’t one adroitly combine the advantages of the old era with those of the new? And produce beauty in the old sense of the word or even art with the machine—does it have to be per se so inimical to beauty? And do it with much less trouble and greater perfection? And for so many more people than previously, when art, in wrongful exclusivity, was reserved only for the few? Thus began the mass-produced pressings, castings, and dieings of Lady of Lourdes statues—and by no means not just of them.

It is truly an experience to encounter for the first time such a Marian herd in one of the thousand religious-goods stores of Lourdes: a cloned nation of devout worshippers, in sizes ranging from two meters to two centimeters. My experience consisted not just of a mild case of the creeps at the sight, but also in the insight that this abundance of Madonnas does not detract from the vision of the Madonna. On the contrary, doesn’t Our Lady in the Catholic world appear to us in duplicate? Aren’t all the various black Madonnas and those of Guadeloupe, of La Salette, of Altoetting, of Kevelaer and of Pilar, and of Pompeii and of Loreto always different and always the same? In contrast, in my visit to a grand sculptural workshop in Carrara, I had the chance to see the David of Michelangelo in its original size twelve times, one standing after another. It was an order of an American Hotel chain. This destroyed Michelangelo’s David for me and he still has not yet recovered from this cruel treatment. One sees that “kitsch” is a complicated subject. It is a symptom of many things, even of societal anguish.

The bourgeois social climber—and who isn’t one—fears kitsch because he could be seen exposed in his lack of taste—our impoverished and minimalistic interiors speak also of the anxiety that through greater opulence, if possible, we could fall into the kitsch trap and find ourselves convicted by the petty bourgeoisie arbiters of taste. That of course can’t happen to someone in his empty room. But kitsch is strong and in our world survives even the strictest preventative measures. We have long since recognized austere kitsch, sour kitsch, Green kitsch, the kitsch of concern and the kitsch of authenticity. Each of these variants is much more difficult to detect and requires a considerably more polished sense of taste to order to discover than the Madonna of Lourdes in her defenseles, naïve innocence. The Madonna of Lourdes does not defend herself but she can offer protection: Cordelia Spaemann, the deceased wife of the philosopher Robert Spaemann, said that the devotional kitsch of the pilgrimage destinations, with the Madonna of Lourdes leading the way, is the bulwark, with which the blasé aesthetes (she speaks of the “riffraff of aesthetes”) can be kept far from the sanctuary.

Let us therefore push aside with due roughness the whole question of kitsch in regard to the Madonna of Lourdes and see directly the plain fact that there has not been one single artistic or handmade creation in the entire twentieth century, which was as clear, universally understood, capable of crossing national and cultural boundaries, functional in the liturgical sense and identifiably Catholic as the Madonna of Lourdes. Her anonymous creator possessed the same form-endowing genius as the creator of Mickey Mouse or the designer of the Coca-Cola logo. Wherever the Madonna of Lourdes stands there is the Catholic Church. In view of her power of self-assertion—and how sweet is this power!—every judgment of taste concerning her shrinks to mere unimportant personal opinions of beauty and ugliness.

At the beginning of the second millennium, the Latin Church disengaged from the tradition of images of the ancient Church—at first gradually but then ever faster and more emphatically. It is worth recapitulating once more the steps of this way in a few words. One has accustomed himself to see this path as a great liberation from the prison of prescriptions and limitations; one has frankly celebrated the development of religious art as the history of progress. In the beginning was the icon, and the icon was governed by strict laws. The icon fixed strictly the appearance of the saints, above all that of the Panhagia and of the Redeemer, in rigid, irreversible rules and prevented every subjective interpretation. The icon thoroughly renounced the sense of space and plasticity of representation long-since attained by Hellenistic painting and strove for two-dimensionality. The coloring of the icon was similarly rigidly established. What the colors of Christ and Mary were; what colors befit the world of the Old and New Testaments; which drapery corresponded to which representation in what situation; what attendants, props and symbols might appear or, rather, had to appear were removed from the personal decision of the painter just like the prayers he had to recite while rubbing the colors or applying the layers of paint on the wooden panel. These icons were not just the pious decoration of a church, but sure signs of the Godly presence of the same rank as the consecrated hosts in the tabernacle. This two-dimensionality was not artistic incapacity, but a sign that the represented figure no longer belonged to the sphere of the carnal world but, through the window of the borders of the icon, looked out from eternity into the earthly world.

Let us set aside the question why the Latin Church left the community of pictorial tradition with the Greek Church—it is enough to say that She did and struck out on the path of a great, exciting adventure that led painting to ever new triumphs. Whether that was also an advantage for the liturgical image is another question. Everyone knows the steps of this liberation: Giotto’s conquest of a new kind of corporeality initiated a process through which over the centuries all phases of each contemporary transformation of biblical figures and biblical themes had to quickly pass. The artists at times change into self-willed theologians, who make their personal interpretations of the Passion of Christ the foundation of their pictures. They become storytellers who also do not shy away from the anecdotal. They take the biblical material as a bare pretext for ever more brilliant painting. They become theater or even opera directors who fashionably stage the stations of the life of Jesus. They sublimate or trivialize the lives of the saints and let them take place on stages of clouds or in the pits of cellars. And after all of that had been tried and the so-called emancipation from the church lawgiver had finally and completely taken place, the official rupture finally came: Western art took leave from her hitherto most generous and most patient Maecenas and turned to other missions. An intimidated and bewildered Church remained, who, unawares, saw Herself pushed away from the aesthetic mainstream of the time and found Herself banished to the remainders of the art business, pale reflections of the changing contemporary fashions.

That the special Western path of religious art has ended, that the liberation of Church art and its deliverance to individualism and subjectivism has led over centuries of corresponding development to a fundamental separation of Church and art has still not yet been properly received by the upper levels of the hierarchy, the pontifical councils for art and similar reverend institutions. However, it has been received for a long time by the faithful. Without the need to issue catchwords and slogans, a change of the veneration of images took place which one could label as “reiconization.” The multi-national people of the Catholic Church has turned to holy pictures, which are not works of art and do not want to be such. Goethe didn’t know how right he was when he wrote in “Roman Elegies” in sneering undertones: “Miraculous paintings are mostly only bad works of art.” Idols are plainly not works of art, and when they are, like the big icons of Byzantium and Russia, they are like them only incidentally. The Orthodox would probably refrain from calling the Lourdes Madonna an icon because for them, the fact that it is a statue stands in the way. The Orthodox rely upon the Old Testament prohibition of pictures—precisely of Simulacra, the plastic representation of gods. However in the nontechnical sense, one may still call the Lourdes Madonna an icon, the icon of the West, created by an anonymous hand, establishing a new standard, a perennial vision, in her capacity as a mass-produced article, radically nonindividualistic, absolutely nonsubjective. She is as far distant from the grand old art of Europe as she is from the art of the twentieth century. For tenured art critics of the 19th century she was art for servant girls, for West European experts of liturgy of the 20th century she is only fit for Poles and Africans. That is a good sign for her ability to live on.

We have called the Lourdes Madonna an icon because of her appeal which can’t be compared to any other work of art made for a church in the twentieth century. The Lourdes Madonna has a justified claim to the honorable title of icon, however, for even more profound and important reasons. In two respects, from her very origin, she corresponds to the highest demands made on true icons. A true icon seeks the ideal of immutability, the pushing back of opportune, personal, and ingeniously inspired things. This does not represent an oriental, anti-individualistic disposition, of an almost Egyptian rigidity, but is intimately linked to the origin of Christian painting and its special requirements. Before the very beginning of Christian veneration of images and painting stands the gigantic, already-mentioned hurdle: that prohibition of pictures of the Old Testament, declared in the second commandment—not simply a prescription of worship, which pertained to the time, but a law spoken by God Himself. For the early Christians, who came from the Jews in no small part, the commandment possessed all the greater obviousness, when the religion of the heathens, in its superabundance of statues of gods, was plainly a religion of images. We know that even Christianity was bound to become a religion of pictures, but it needed an authorization thereto, that could not have been spoken by men — God Himself had to annul that prohibition of pictures, and He really had annulled it. St. Paul had first pronounced that Jesus Christ was “God’s picture.” The God who became flesh permitted that human visual perception could possess His image. That was indeed only one aspect of His multifarious self-offering to man.

And yet the fear would have been insuperable to paint the man Jesus just like the unique, beautiful mummy-portraits of Faiyum created in near-by Egypt during His lifetime, if there hadn’t been a picture of Jesus, that didn’t originate from human hand and remained as testimony to the time on earth of the redeemer. I am speaking of that canvas, which Goethe in “West-östlichen Diwan” calls “the cloth of clothes upon which the likeness of the Lord impressed itself.” This shadowy impression, this mysterious picture, which was created not by artistic methods, without a brush and colors, without a portrait-staging, stands at the beginning of all Christian painting. This cloth of cloths is the foundation for the typus (normative image – translator) of Christ, which was conserved for hundreds of years, until Michelangelo broke free from it in an act of violence. Here lies the basis for the strict form of the icon: the icon is based on a likeness established by God himself — who would dare to lay hands on it? The notion remained alive in the Christian East that a liturgical picture, a picture for the service of God, always should be one created by God Himself and received, not made, by man. Here one recognizes icons of special dignity, which, according to tradition, are not painted by the hand of man—they are known as “acheiropoetos” and they radiate out to many icons, created by nameless painters, which really also had to be “acheiropoetos” and which in every case were painted according to the example of such pictures.

Is it not amazing how closely the Lourdes Madonna corresponds to this view of the Christian image — this product of industry, that at first appears to stand in the sharpest possible contrast to the venerable pictures of early Christianity? It depends not on artistic invention but on the vision of a saint, who described how that “white Lady” (as she said) approached her in a cave, so as to introduce herself (in the dialect of the Pyrenees) as an “Immaculate Conception.” Not, it is to be noted, as the immaculately conceived one, but the abstract concept in human form, as the incarnation of the word. And following the description given by the shepherdess, a modeler in a religious-goods factory or perhaps even several such men, whose names with high probability no one any longer can discover, created this statue as the “vera icon,” as the true image of the appearance, which since has been produced hundreds of thousands of times. She is truly “acheiropoetos” with her nonindividual features, like a doll, similar to every man and no man, as befits the first human of the new creation, the perfect new Eve. Who dares to maintain that we deserve something better?

It’s safe to say that no other work advocating the Traditional liturgy has had the worldwide impact of Martin Mosebach’s Die Häresie der Formlosigkeit of 2002. Now, after ten years, Martin Mosebach has published a second collection of his non-fiction dealing explicitly with matters Catholic. I say “explicitly” because a deep Catholic sensibility underlies all of Martin Mosebach’s work. In Die Häresie the essays all revolved around the question of the liturgy; in Der Ultramontane (“The Ultramontane”) Mosebach deals with a broader spectrum of issues agitating the Church today.

The very title is a confrontation with the Catholic Church of Germany. In no other country is the anti-Roman and anti-papal rage so widespread as in Pope Benedict’s own homeland. In the country where any other expression of patriotic feeling is taboo it is only in relation to the Roman Catholic Church that nationalistic sentiment flourishes. The list of demands by Catholic theologians, clergy and laity aired almost daily in the media will be familiar: recognition of divorce, abolition of clerical celibacy, women priests, homosexual marriage, greater ‘democracy” in the Church etc. The German hierarchy either avoids confronting the attacks or not so subtly cooperates in enabling the protests. Against this attitude Mosebach professes Ultramontanism: the notion that every Catholic by his loyalty to a specific man – the pope – is a member of two jurisdictions or communities. He cannot give absolute loyalty to the German state and its current ideology. Mosebach thus cleverly links the current battles with persecution of the Church by Bismarck’s Prussia in the 19th century – the Kulturkampf – a struggle waged against the despised Ultramontane supporters of the pope. He points out once more that the papacy has prevented the creation of closed, totalitarian states in Europe – an observation made as early as the 18th century regarding the caesaropapism of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II.

In several of these essays Mosebach enters the lists in favor of Papacy and Pope Benedict. He defends the Pope on the recognition of the FSSPX, on the absence of “democracy” in the church and the sexual abuse scandals. It is clear, however, that by Ultramontanism Mosebach does not mean a return to the pre-Conciliar regime centered on the Papacy. In He is after all just the Pope, Mosebach speaks of the salutary limits of papal authority – that infallibility is nothing but the submission of the Pope to Tradition. Now that is a concept with which even the Orthodox can get comfortable.

As in Die Häresie, Der Ultramontane shows the versatility of Mosebach’s style. There is straightforward polemic such as By Their (Piddling) Fruits you will know them: Six Theses on the Reform of the Liturgy. In 2004, like a kind of Ultramontane Martin Luther, Mosebach spoke out alone for the Traditional liturgy at the Katholikentag (Catholic congress) – Germanchurch’s progressive love fest. Or the “discussion paper” On the Value of Forbidding dealing with blasphemy – an ever increasing phenomenon in Europe, mostly directed against the Christianity – often by “artists”. Here Mosebach considers that it may well be advisable for the state to legally restrict blasphemy – and that it may not be so bad that outraged Muslims have given blasphemous artists a good scare.

Mosebach also employs a more poetic discourse, such as in the essays on Rome and Lourdes. The reader can here get an idea of Mosebach’s skill as a travel writer. In a short but marvelous evocation of the eternal city, the author focuses on the omnipresent ruins of the past. This is the true Rome – the spolia of past ages surviving into the present: not set apart in museums but aimlessly scattered about or even reused for utilitarian purposes. Mosebach even advances the thesis that the construction of St. Peter’s in the 16th century was, in a certain sense, a sin against the true spirit of Rome – as embodied in the age-old Constantinian basilica it replaced.

The friend of the Traditional Liturgy will also find much that will interest him. In addition to the Six Theses there is The Old Roman Missal between Loss and Rediscovery – a profound reflection on the liturgical history of the last 40+ years. In On Prayer, Mosebach argues powerfully for the significance of repetition in prayer – especially in the rosary! – and of maintaining correct posture.

I particularly liked Mosebach’s essay on the Lourdes Madonna. Mosebach starts from the time when, as a young boy in pre-Conciliar times, he began to encounter the Madonna of Lourdes: first, on a dresser in the house of a friend of his family, later, nearly everywhere. Mosebach then develops an entire theology of the image out of the contemplation of a mass – produced statuette often despised – especially by the artistic pundits of the Church in Western Europe. The author links the Lourdes Madonna with certain icons of the East the originals of which were considered as “not made by human hands.” As an attempt to reproduce a vision, the Lourdes Madonna falls into the same category. It is a true icon of the West.

In sum, Der Ultramontane offers a treasure trove of insights on liturgy, theology, art, Church government and contemporary spiritual issues. All is short and sweet, reflecting the concise style of a true master of prose. Der Ultramontane does not repeat platitudes or reinforce received opinions – it will make you think. Mosebach often returns, as a Leitmotiv of this work , to the “dual loyalty” of the Catholic: to the country/regime in which he lives and to the Church as represented by Rome. What outraged liberals of the Bismarck era or contemporary German Catholics is nevertheless central to our identity as Catholics. And is this not a quintessentially Catholic theme dating back to the time of Augustine?

We of course would wish that Der Ultramontane be translated into English as soon as possible. That should not be that hard – some of the ground work has already been done. One of the essays has already been translated on this website; several others on Roger McCaffrey’s The Traditionalist. Martin Mosebach himself presented, in English, The Old Roman Missal betweenLoss and Rediscovery first in 2010 in Colombo, then in 2011 in New York – it can be found on the NLM. And one essay, on the election of Pope Benedict, appeared first in English in the New York Times/ International Herald Tribune!

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